At the Queens Museum, artist Christine Sun Kim’s newly completed mural features the words TIME OWES ME REST AGAIN, scrawled in black, spanning a crisp white wall, 40ft high and 100ft wide. The familiar action lines you would recognize from comic books set the words in motion: “TIME” hops along a pair of bouncing curves; “OWES” zips down to the floor with a splat!; and “REST” shoots upward into a pair of clouds. Poof poof!
These comic references are a new development in her work, Kim tells me in American Sign Language, logged on to Zoom from her home in Berlin. (Her interpreter, Su Kyong Isakson, translates in a separate screen.) “They’re so dynamic in showing movement,” the artist adds; each bounce and zip represents how these words in ASL bring the hands in contact with the body. “TIME” is two taps on the wrist, she explains, and “OWES” is the index finger landing on the upward palm. “REST”, which is the arms crossed over the chest with closed fists, becomes a focal point in our conversation. In the mural, it describes both a collective fatigue under the burdens of capitalism (“It’s slowly killing us all,” Kim recently tweeted), as well as her own exhaustion navigating a world designed for the hearing. “As a deaf person,” she says, “you have to conserve your energy.”
