Month: January 2023

       “Christine Sun Kim: The World Is Sound” is one eight-minute video by artist Christine Sum Kim. In this video, she describes some artwork of her series “the sound of”. The video has no sound, Christine used sign language and caption to convey her ideas. She illustrated five artwork of series “the sound of”, including passing time, temperature rising, and waiting room, by showing the idea of each piece, the meaning of musical signs in the artwork and her feeling in such situations.

       Christine used nothing but a sequence of three musical signs, f, p, and sfz, to represent the sound of different things. With the combination of musical signs, the amount, and the frequency of each note, she conveyed the tense and smoothing emotion. One novel idea is that she found a way to produce and represent sounds for those events that normally has no sound. For example, time passing, and temperature rising are events that does not have a concrete form, more like a concept rather than something we can actually hear or see. However, using merely musical signs on the paper, Christine presented these events using a combination of vision and auditory, the audience could understand the event by “seeing the sound”.

       To me personally, I found two points most amazing in this video. First is that the video itself has no sound, no people speaking nor background music, while the video is talking about sound all the time. This contradiction separates the ideas of hearing the sound and perceiving the sound. Although I heard nothing, I can somehow feel the sound that is discussed in the video. This let me think about the form of sounds. Is hearing the only way for one to perceive sound, or if visions and feelings can also provide enough information for the audience to receive sounds. So that the sound does not come from the outside world but is generated from our brains. The second striking point is how sound is able to describe something abstract, something does not necessarily have a sound. As in “the sound of temperature rising”, she gives appropriate and vivid sound to the concept of temperature rising and showed the motion and changes of such an abstract concept. These artworks lightened the point for me that how senses can be used to describe seemly irrelevant ideas and events.

       In short, I think this video and the several artworks in the video very creative and inspiring, as they provided me many new thoughts about auditory and sound.

Reference

Christine Sun Kim. “The World Is Sound”. Youtube.Com, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vU4TCKxZlc&t=180s.