Six years ago, the California-born artist Christine Sun Kim, 39, moved from New York City’s Chinatown to Berlin. “I fell in love,” she explains. Her eyes widen and brows lift as she signs, “I’m actually not a big fan of making these big moves for love. But it worked out really well for me.” After earning two M.F.A.s — from the School of Visual Arts and Bard College — and finding a foothold in New York, it was time to find a different way to practice.

In transgressive textual drawings, videos and participatory performances, Kim visualizes sounds and distills spoken language into clever new forms. She was selected for the 2013 MoMA show “Soundings,” the museum’s first exhibition dedicated to sound art, and she has become known for her powerful works that demonstrate the possibilities of sound as an artistic medium (her 2015 TED Talk about the similarities between music and sign language currently has over one and a half million views). A series of her large-format charcoal drawings, which explore navigating the hearing world as a deaf person, are now on view at the 79th Whitney Biennial in New York. The six works pair depictions of varying mathematical angles with correlative, rage-inducing encounters that are both broadly applicable — “being given a Braille menu at a restaurant” or “offered a wheelchair at an airport” — and painfully specific to her experience — “curators who think it’s fair to split my fee with interpreters.” After a controversy-laden 2017 show, this year’s biennial, curated by Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley, highlights the most diverse group of artists yet; the majority of the 75 participants are people of color, and two-thirds are women. In her works in the exhibition, Kim explores her various identities — as Korean-American, as a new mother and as a deaf artist — taking the maxim “the personal is political” to a new level.

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