Remai Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery present Christine Sun Kim

September 22, 2022

Christine Sun Kim’s new exhibition, titled Oh Me Oh My, debuts simultaneously at Remai Modern in Saskatoon and the Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG) in Vancouver.

The artist’s first major solo museum exhibition in North America is called Oh Me Oh My. It will be shown in the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, and the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, after the concurrent exhibition at Remai Modern and CAG.

Kim explores the ways in which we perceive and think about sound in her work. She casts doubt on the idea that hearing something is just an auditory experience by emphasizing that we can detect sound in a variety of contexts, such as the visual, bodily, and political ones.

In order to create her own visual vocabulary for a range of mediums, including performance, drawing, video, and more, Kim, whose first language is American Sign Language (ASL), explores and uses components from various information systems, including graphic and musical notation, body language, and ASL.

Her dry sense of humor is evident in every aspect of the exhibition, including the drawings on paper from the series English vs. Deaf English, which contrasts the ways in which various words and moods are expressed through lists that have the poetic quality of poetry. Pie chart illustrations, such as Why I Work with Sign Language Interpreters and Why I Stopped Taking Speech Therapy, convey subjective views on real-life experiences and individual choices using what appear to be objective statistical representations. Building on concrete poetry and conceptual sound compositions, a number of large-scale paintings erected across both institutions physically represent the events and histories they depict.

At Remai Modern, various audio and video pieces prominently involve collaboration with artists and musicians, revealing the intimacy and dependency necessary to forge meaningful connections with movies, with art, and with one another. Two public artworks are installed at the Contemporary Art Gallery and the close-by Yaletown-Roundhouse Station to go along with the exhibition. These works—like a large portion of Kim’s output—challenge widely held hierarchies that tether voice inextricably to sound, disrupting the implicit authority of the spoken over the signed and the aural over other perceptual planes. They trace social debts to consider what we owe one another and map the distortions and delays inherent to Deaf/hearing communication.

Oh Me Oh My will be accompanied by Kim’s first monograph, which will be published in 2023.

Christine Sun Kim (b. 1980, California) lives and works in Berlin. She has presented artwork extensively including the Whitney Biennial, 2019; Art Institute of Chicago, 2019; San Francisco Art Museum of Modern Art, 2017; De Appel Art Center, 2017; amongst many others. She is the recipient of an MIT Media Lab Fellowship and a TED Senior Fellowship. In 2020 she became a recipient of a Disabilities Future Fellowship from the Ford and Mellon Foundations.