Moon Mind

Gallery Hyundai is pleased to present _Moon Mind_, a solo exhibition by Christine Sun Kim (b. 1980), on view from August 26 through October 18. Marking Kim's first gallery exhibition in Korea and her first solo presentation with Gallery Hyundai, the exhibition will debut the artist's shaped canvas paintings for the first time. Kim has long transformed personal experience into new forms of language rather than direct representation, exploring the social structures of sound and language through her practice. In _Moon Mind_, Kim shifts her focus toward the mind, memory, family, relationships with those around her, and her roots, presenting approximately thirty new shaped canvas paintings and drawings. Christine Sun Kim's practice studies how sound operates within society, addressing questions of sound, language, power, access, and social relations through a distinctive visual language. Working across drawing, performance, video, installation, large-scale murals, and public projects, Kim brings together American Sign Language (ASL), musical notation, written language, infographics, and humor as central elements of her work. Grounded in Deaf culture and her own experience, Kim examines the rules of communication assumed by a society organized around spoken language. Her work asks who gets to speak, who controls meaning, and which languages gain recognition in public space. The exhibition title _Moon Mind_ carries multiple layers of meaning that emerged as Kim looked more closely at her inner world and roots. In ASL, the signs for "mind" and "moon" both involve a tap on the temple, creating a connection between the two words. The moon also appears in expressions that refer to time and the past, such as "once in a blue moon" and "many moons ago." At the same time, Kim's daughter is named Dal, which means "moon" in Korean. For Kim, the moon connects the mind, family, time, language, and her roots as a Korean American artist. It is also a recurring symbol found across expressions, myths, and stories in many languages. In this way, _Moon Mind_ introduces a new body of work that begins with the artist's inner world and expands toward family, memory, cultural roots, and relationships with other minds.