Christine Sun Kim: Deaf Material

Deaf Material by Christine Sun Kim showcases the artist’s vast archive of deaf imagery in mainstream culture. Personal yet expansive, the publication collects over 600 vernacular photographs and images Kim has taken in her daily life or collected from books, online resources, and the archives at Gallaudet University. Frustrated by the lack of documentation of Deaf history, Kim began this project in an effort to determine what and who defines deaf aesthetics.

The breadth of the archive—which spans pop culture imagery, memes, advertisements, disability signage, artworks, personal ephemera, and much more—presents an overview of deaf visual culture filtered through the incisive criticality and biting humor that the artist has become known for. It is the artist’s hope that Deaf Material will inspire others to begin their own archival projects so that a public and global archive of Deaf culture will emerge.

The publication unfolds over the course of 400 pages with a Tumblr-style aesthetic that is framed by 24 distinct categories such as Airports, Celebrity ASL, Call and Wait, Deaf Power, Deaf/death, Parking Lots, and Trash. Kim teases out subtle connections through recurring visual patterns and thematic motifs across these chapters. Interwoven with these images are captions by the artist that expand on the archive through anecdotes, historical context, and commentary, providing an outline of deaf experiences and aesthetics since the late nineteenth century.

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, Kim explores her relationship to spoken and signed languages, to her built and social environments, and to the world at large. Kim’s work has been extensively exhibited and performed internationally.