Christine Sun Kim

“Giving too much thought to the future can be overwhelming, especially in an uncertain political climate,” mused artist Christine Sun Kim at one point during a conversation about the title image. But she added that doing so could offer a reminder “that there are a wide variety of positive futures for everybody to dive into.” In her drawings, Kim creates spaces of association where one can explore different perspectives and viewpoints regarding the future.

The signs that Christine Sun Kim uses in five of the works presented here all share a reductive graphic form. For example, a line extends from left to right in a sweeping and then smaller adjoining semicircle—a reference to the signed word “future” in American Sign Language, as Kim explains in a video about her art. In other pieces she uses musical notation or symbolic depictions of sound in variations rendered in charcoal, pastel chalk or oil pastels. She combines these with brief annotations to create a series of humorous, ambiguous and ambivalent visions of the future.

The drawings by Christine Sun Kim appear in the third issue of fünf zu eins in response to the question “What does art know that we don’t?”