Christine Sun Kim, a multidisciplinary artist known for her radical engagement with sound, language, and the politics of listening, has long challenged conventional notions of auditory experience. As a Deaf artist, Kim has forged a groundbreaking path by exploring how sound can be perceived and represented visually, conceptually, and physically. Among her most nuanced and tactile explorations is her series of beaded sound wave installations, a body of work that transforms ephemeral audio phenomena into enduring, intricate, and materially rich visual forms. In these installations, sound becomes not only visible but touchable, a sensory bridge between perception and translation, noise and silence, identity and abstraction.
In Kim’s beaded sound wave installations, the undulating lines typically associated with digital sound spectrograms or waveforms are transposed into delicate, precise curves constructed from thousands of hand-applied beads. The beadwork reimagines sound not as vibration alone but as a visual language, encoded in light-reflective patterns and fine textures. Rather than employing traditional audio-visual tools like video or LED spectrograms, Kim uses beads as both a medium and a metaphor—objects that must be handled with patience, consideration, and physical care. This deliberate, labor-intensive practice speaks to her broader themes of accessibility, the aesthetics of non-verbal communication, and the assertion of Deaf culture within dominant sensory paradigms.
One of her most acclaimed installations, The Shape of Sound is Yours, spans an entire gallery wall with a linear waveform rendered in black, white, and metallic beads. Each peak and trough, each stretched-out silence or clipped signal, corresponds to a real sound Kim has either conceptually referenced or co-authored. In some cases, these beaded waveforms depict the shape of a spoken word, like “freedom” or “listen,” captured visually through audio software and then painstakingly replicated by hand. In others, they map ambient noise levels from public spaces, protest chants, or even the artist’s own vocalized breaths—events that exist on the margins of typical hearing, reframed here as elaborate, glistening visual objects.
The beading technique itself is meticulously executed. Kim employs a wide array of bead sizes, from ultra-fine seed beads to slightly larger cut-glass variants, allowing for subtle modulations in width, density, and light reflection. Each section of the waveform is stitched onto canvas or mounted panels using an invisible thread matrix, so that the beads appear to float or shimmer along the surface. This creates an effect similar to that of sound pulsing through air—an illusion of motion in static form. The choice of colors, too, carries significance: black and white often dominate as references to binary code and the visual contrast of ASL (American Sign Language) finger spelling, while flashes of neon or iridescent hues suggest disruption, amplification, or the emotional intensity of the sound being depicted.
Thematically, Kim’s beaded installations expand upon her longstanding inquiry into how Deaf people experience sound and how systems of communication often marginalize non-auditory knowledge. Beads, traditionally associated with tactile craft and often coded as feminine or domestic, are elevated here into conceptual tools. They become agents of resistance against the assumption that sound is only audible. Through them, Kim makes clear that sound can be felt, seen, even embroidered. She draws inspiration from her personal history navigating sound as a Deaf person—negotiating lipreading, captioning, and vibrations—and reclaims the visual and material territory of audio representation.
In works such as Silent Loudness and Captioned Frequencies, Kim includes interpretive captions embroidered directly beneath or beside the beaded waveforms. These textual annotations, often in the style of closed captions or emotional descriptors like “[distant gunfire]” or “[nervous laughter],” call attention to the often-overlooked aesthetics of captioning itself. Rather than being mere utilitarian supports for the Deaf, captions here become part of the artwork’s structure and critique, highlighting how sound is mediated through power, control, and access. By pairing these captions with tangible bead lines, Kim amplifies the disconnect between auditory events and their cultural interpretation, questioning whose language is privileged and whose presence is validated in sonic environments.
Kim’s use of beadwork also engages with historical traditions of storytelling and record-keeping through tactile media. Beads, like braille or woven textiles, carry an inherent connection to non-verbal narrative. They are symbols of continuity, repetition, and temporality—each one placed by hand, each contributing to a larger rhythm. This manual process mirrors the temporal dimension of sound itself and allows Kim to insert her physical agency into the work, a process that counters the often abstract and machine-driven nature of sound visualization in digital spaces. It is not just the sound that is being translated; it is the politics of listening and the role of the artist as translator between worlds.
Her installations have been shown at major institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, and the Berlin Biennale, often as part of larger exhibitions exploring disability aesthetics, language, and experimental sound. Viewers encounter these beaded works not only as visual objects but as invitations to think differently about how sound operates across bodies, cultures, and technologies. The act of moving along the length of a beaded waveform, of reading the rise and fall of tiny glinting elements, replicates the act of listening through the eyes and fingertips—a multisensory experience that expands what it means to engage with art.
Christine Sun Kim’s beaded sound wave installations are among the most eloquent expressions of her mission to reframe sound as a conceptual and cultural construct. By merging the visual discipline of beadwork with the formal structure of sonic waveforms, she offers a profound critique of sensory hierarchy and a celebration of alternate modes of knowledge. These installations speak not in decibels but in density, not in echo but in embroidery. They invite audiences to reimagine the contours of sound, not as a medium to be heard, but as a presence to be seen, touched, and understood in new and transformative ways.