Christine Sun Kim
She // Her // Hers
[ID: An Asian American woman poses with her body in profile, looking into the camera over her left shoulder. She is wearing a red denim jacket and black sunglasses with her blonde dyed hair around her shoulders, and she is standing against a red-orange painted house.]
Portrait photo by Mark Abramson.
US and Germany,
2023 USA Fellow
This award was generously supported by the Mellon Foundation.
_
Christine Sun Kim is an American artist based in Berlin. Kim’s practice considers how sound operates in society, deconstructing the politics of sound and exploring how oral languages operate as social currency. Musical notation, written language, infographics, American Sign Language (ASL), the use of the body, and strategically deployed humor are all recurring elements in her practice. Working across drawing, performance, video, and large-scale murals; she explores her relationship to spoken languages, to her built and social environments, and to the world at large.
She has exhibited and performed internationally, including at the Queens Museum (2022); the Drawing Center, New York (2022); the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2021); Manchester International Festival (2021); MIT List Visual Arts Center (2020); Whitney Biennial, (2019); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2019); Art Institute of Chicago (2018); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017); De Appel Arts Center, Amsterdam (2017); Berlin Biennale (2016); Shanghai Biennale (2016); MoMA PS1 (2015), MoMA (2013), among others. She is an inaugural awardee of the Ford and Mellon Foundations’ Disabilities Future Fellowship, a TED Senior Fellowship, an MIT Media Lab Fellowship, and the 2022 Prix International d’Art Contemporain of the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco. Her works are held in the collections of the MoMA; LACMA; Tate Britain; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art; among others. Kim is represented by François Ghebaly Gallery in Los Angeles and White Space in Beijing.
Time Owes Me Rest Again, 2022. Mural, dimensions approximately 35 × 100 feet. Photo by Hai Zhang; courtesy of the Queens Museum.[ID: Image of a large-scale artwork covering the interior white wall of a building. The words “Time Owes Me Rest Again” are written in black against the wall, given motion by sweeping comic book style lines that imply the words are bouncing across the wall or being hurled from the sky.]
How Do You Hold Your Debt, 2022. Charcoal on paper, dimensions 44 × 44 inches. Photo by Paul Salveson; courtesy of François Ghebaly Gallery.[ID: A black-and-white line drawing with the words “how do you hold your debt” written at the top. Outstretched hands are placed around the background, each one has a banner coming out of the palm with the words “childcare, mortgage, taxes, utilities, student loans, credit card, and health insurance.”]
One Week of Lullabies for Roux, 2020. Sound, seven channels, various runtimes. Photo by Peter Harris Studio; courtesy of MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA.[ID: A photograph of a gallery installation. On the walls are three large pie charts, hand drawn with thin line work. In the center of the room is a long rectangular bench. The bench is covered with cushions colored red, crimson, maroon, purple, indigo, blue, and violet. Each cushion has headphones resting on top.]