How does one trap an echo? For artist Christine Sun Kim, it’s a matter of sealing it in a cube and suspending it mid-air. At Art Basel Hong Kong, she will unveil “A String of Echo Traps”, a three-dimensional digital animation projected across four faces of a cube hanging in the atrium of the Pacific Place shopping mall. “It has four sides, just like there are four letters in the word ‘echo’, so that’s really fun to play with,” says Kim of the work, which is part of the fair’s Encounters programme. “I feel like I’m secretly a designer deep down.”
The work grows out of the artist’s longstanding fascination with the politics of sound — who controls it and how it shapes everyday life. Rooted in her experience as a deaf person navigating a hearing world, Kim’s art gives playful form to the fraught business of communication: delays, mistranslation, the ways language can break down walls but also reinforce them. “Echo Traps” conveys the repetitive, sometimes stifling nature of mediated exchanges: closed captions, text messages or, as in our interview, an American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter, all of which Kim views as “echoes”.
Installation photo of ‘A String of Echo Traps’ (2022), an animated three-channel video installation by Christine Sun Kim © Courtesy of the artist, La Casa Encendida, Fondation Prince Pierre
