The subtext of the artist’s fondness for laughter, data visualization and other universal modes of communication is a general wariness of being misrepresented and misunderstood Kim knows intimately well how language barriers, as well as poor language choices, have the power to marginalize. They wouldn’t do the complex contemplative work that I want them to do.” “If I were just mad without the humor, I think it might be uncomfortable and people would leave. Kim initially feared that the piece would make her look angry, but “humor brings a level of access, kind of like a meme,” she says.
DEAF COMPOSER SERIES
The former is a pie chart of misguided commentary that Kim’s heard over the years: “You’re smart for a deaf person” or “I’m sorry you can’t hear.” The latter, her breakout charcoal series from the 2019 Whitney Biennial, provides metrics for frustration on a scale of 1 to 360 degrees: museums with no deaf programming elicit a 360-degree circle of “Full on Rage”, while in-flight entertainment with no captions only elicits 180 degrees, a semi-circle of “Straight Up Rage”. “Humor is such an important part of the work, and I see how she uses it very tactically,” Uyeda adds, describing how drawings like Shit Hearing People Say to Me and Degrees of Deaf Rage are serious grievances tempered by jokes. In her 2016 video, Classified Digits, she plays out specific conversations – Skyping over spotty wifi, for example – solely through the awkwardness on her face, while the artist Thomas Mader, her husband and sometimes collaborator, acts them out with his hands as if they were hers. Facial expressions, “which represent grammar in ASL”, Kim says, also play a prominent role. In The Sound of Temperature Rising, for example, a 2019 mural about impending climate change, the title accompanies four musical notes that float upwards and multiply, illustrating a boiling crescendo. “She’s very much creating her own language.” Combined with the features of ASL, including rhythmic spacing and repetition, ordinary English text finds movement. “There’s a freshness to her work that represents a new kind of voice,” says Gan Uyeda, a director at Kim’s Los Angeles gallery, Francois Ghebaly. Her art, which spans performance, video and naively styled drawings in charcoal and oil pastel, distills sound to its essential qualities – its moods and materialities, emotional frequencies and social baggage. Born deaf in Orange county, California, to a family of hearing parents and a deaf older sister, she experienced sound by closely watching its effects on hearing people. Time Owes Me Rest Again, on view through January 2023, is the kind of visual poetry innate to Kim’s practice, where for more than a decade, she’s played with the structures of language and notation to depict her relationship to sound.
“As a deaf person,” she says, “you have to conserve your energy.” In the mural, it describes both a collective fatigue under the burdens of capitalism (“It’s slowly killing us all,” Kim recently tweeted), as well as her own exhaustion navigating a world designed for the hearing. “REST”, which is the arms crossed over the chest with closed fists, becomes a focal point in our conversation. “TIME” is two taps on the wrist, she explains, and “OWES” is the index finger landing on the upward palm.
DEAF COMPOSER ZIP
(Her interpreter, Su Kyong Isakson, translates in a separate screen.) “They’re so dynamic in showing movement,” the artist adds each bounce and zip represents how these words in ASL bring the hands in contact with the body.
These comic references are a new development in her work, Kim tells me in American Sign Language, logged on to Zoom from her home in Berlin.
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