Oh Me Oh My
September 22, 2022
Oh Me Oh My is a new exhibition by artist Christine Sun Kim, opening concurrently at Remai Modern, Saskatoon and the Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG), Vancouver.
Oh Me Oh My is the artist’s first full-scale solo museum exhibition in North America. Following the concurrent exhibition at Remai Modern and CAG, it will be presented at The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, and the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio.
In her work, Kim engages with how we experience and conceptualize sound. She challenges the notion that sound is a solely auditory experience, foregrounding it as something we sense through multiple dimensions including the visual, physical and political realms.
Kim, whose first language is American Sign Language (ASL), explores and employs elements from various information systems—including graphic and musical notation, body language, and ASL—using these systems to develop her own visual vocabulary in a variety of mediums including performance, drawing, video and more.
Her dry sense of humour is present throughout the exhibition such as in drawings on paper from the series English vs Deaf English which compares how various words and sentiments are conveyed through lists that read as poetry. Drawings of pie charts including Why I Work with Sign Language Interpreters and Why I Stopped Taking Speech Therapy, use seemingly objective statistical forms to present subjective reflections on lived experience and personal decisions. A series of large-scale murals installed across both institutions physically embody the phenomena and histories they convey, building on strategies of concrete poetry and conceptual sound scores.
At Remai Modern, collaboration with artists and musicians feature significantly in several audio and video works and reveal the intimacy and interdependence required for meaningful connections to be formed with films, with art, and with one another. At the Contemporary Art Gallery, two public artworks accompany the exhibition, installed on the gallery’s façade and at nearby Yaletown-Roundhouse Station. Tracing social debts to consider what we owe one another and mapping the distortions and delays inherent to Deaf/hearing communication, these works—as with much 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.
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.
Remai Modern would like to acknowledge the Embassy and Consulates of The United States of America in Canada for supporting this exhibition.
This exhibition is supported by the United States Department of State. The opinions, findings and conclusions stated herein are those of the author[s] and do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Department of State.
Remai Modern
102 Spadina Crescent East
Saskatoon Saskatchewan S7K 0L3
Canada
Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver
555 Nelson St
Vancouver, BC V6B 6R5
Canada
