The artist, who gave an iconic ASL performance at the Super Bowl last year, draws our attention to the struggle of power, ideology, and systems in the juncture of languages.

You know that split-second lag when translating between two languages (however you define them), when meaning starts to slide into a string of unintelligible symbols? That’s the space that Christine Sun Kim’s artworks occupy. Her drawings use systems of information — from musical scores to infographics to emojis — to question systemic dissonances between Hearing and Deaf cultures. The results straddle the line between semantic wordplay and semiotic breakdown, evidenced in the artist’s current solo exhibition titled Trauma, LOL at François Ghebaly, Los Angeles.

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