Christine Sun Kim: Deaf Material - (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Unfolding over the course of nearly 400 pages, Kim's archive of personal and vernacular imagery asserts her singular vision for deaf aesthetics

American artist Christine Sun Kim (born 1980) has developed a unique visual language incorporating musical notation, body language and American Sign Language to create a singular body of multidisciplinary work channeling her experiences and traumas navigating a hearing world. This publication interweaves hundreds of archival photographs with expanded captions by the artist to create a book that is both deeply personal and wide-reaching in its investigation of deaf imagery in mainstream culture from the last half century. Kim's photographs document a broad range of what she has coined "deaf artifacts," spanning from pop culture imagery that appropriates Deaf culture to internet memes created by members of the Deaf community to disability signage and vernacular pamphlets to personal ephemera collected throughout her life. This vast personal archive has been organized into thematic sections, including "Celebrity ASL," "Call and Wait," "lnterepters" and "Parking lots," while also teasing out subtler connections through recurring visual patterns and motifs. In addition to drawing from Kim's personal collection of photographs, the book incorporates images from the institutional archives of Gallaudet University, the world's first higher education institution for Deaf and hard of hearing students.