Christine Sun Kim: Time Owes Me Rest Again

About

Kim’s work makes audible noise perceivable, giving it visual, physical, and conceptual properties.

Kim’s site-responsive project, Time Owes Me Rest Again (2022), is a mural on the monumental 40 x 100-foot wall encasing the 9,000-square foot Panorama of the City of New York. A dynamically choreographed group of drawings each representing the five words in the title (“Time,” “Owes,” “Me,” “Rest,” “Again”) in American Sign Language (ASL). Playfully reenacting the physical and psychological articulation of ASL, the words were chosen for their hand motion involving the signing hand coming in contact with the signer’s body—“me,” for example, is signed by an index finger poking on the chest once. These notations echo and bounce off each other to render a lethargic feeling drawn from the societal and systemic inequity that persists between Deaf communities and the hearing communities. Time Owes Me Rest Again also reflects upon the unease and fatigue induced by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in New York City. The Queens Museum’s immediate neighborhoods of Corona and Elmhurst, with a concentration of immigrant populations from Latin America and Asia, were among the hardest hit in 2020, enduring amplified malignancies of capitalism. The work incorporates an original digital animation that renders the incremental development of its composition and the gestural nature of each sign.

Christine Sun Kim’s work represents the complex realities of Deaf culture. Defining sound as a multi-sensory phenomenon whose properties are auditory, visual, and spatial, as well as socially determined, much of Kim’s work is invested in scrutinizing cultures that tend to ascribe lesser relevance to signed communication, challenging the implicit authority of spoken over signed language.