Hand Palm Echo 1
2022 - NFT (NFT)
Christine Sun Kim
Hand Palm Echo 1 is a digital animation based on Christine Sun Kim’s staircase mural at The Drawing Center in New York (10 March – 22 May, 2022). Sun produced this NFT from a still image of the animation that features a drawn notation of the sign “echo” in American Sign Language. Visually the black and white image depicts two side by side mounds, one labelled ‘Hand’ and the other labelled ‘Palm’. The sign, which unfolds like a sound wave, can be made by taking the fingers of one hand to reach out and touch and then glide back from the palm of the other upheld hand. The artist observes that, at its most basic level, an echo is a kind of repetition that is produced when a sound hits a surface. In turn, her work addresses how information is received and processed by Deaf people and sign language interpreters. Hand Palm Echo 1 illustrates how the relationship between a Deaf person and an interpreter hinges on the echo created by the interpreter repeating what they hear, or what Kim describes as a series of visual echoes.
Christine Sun Kim is an American artist based in Berlin. Working predominantly in drawing, performance, and video, Kim’s practice considers how sound operates in society, deconstructing the politics of sound, and exploring oral languages as social currency. Musical notation, written language, American Sign Language (ASL), and the use of the body are all recurring elements in her work. She further uses sound to explore her own relationship to verbal languages and her environment.
