Christine Sun Kim, a trailblazing sound artist and visual thinker, has long been known for her conceptual investigations into the social, physical, and linguistic dimensions of sound. As a Deaf artist working at the intersection of performance, drawing, and installation, Kim has challenged and expanded how sound is experienced and understood—especially for audiences attuned to the visual over the auditory. In one of her most profound departures into material form, she created Beaded Sound Waves, a large-scale installation in which auditory phenomena were translated into intricate beadwork. This work repositions beads—typically used as visual or tactile decoration—as mediums capable of carrying acoustic and conceptual weight. It is a translation of vibrations into patterns, of voice into textile, and of temporality into permanence.
The installation, first exhibited in Berlin and later adapted for display in New York and Seoul, consists of an immense suspended curtain composed of densely strung beads, arranged in meticulously plotted rows that mimic the graphical depiction of sound waves. The inspiration for the project came from Kim’s ongoing examination of waveform notations and spectrograms—visual representations of amplitude and frequency over time. Rather than using these forms in flat, inked renderings as she had in her earlier works on paper, she reimagined them in three-dimensional space using beads, creating an environment where viewers could move alongside and through the waveforms, physically engaging with representations of sound.
Each strand in the curtain functions like a thread of sonic data. Tiny seed beads of varying colors and finishes—opaque, metallic, matte, and translucent—are strung in sequences that denote shifts in pitch, intensity, and rhythm. In some areas, the beads cluster densely to signify loudness or complexity, while in others they thin out into sparse patterns of negative space, signaling quiet or rest. The strands collectively form topographies that rise and fall, pulse and ripple, evoking the dynamic patterns of spoken language, ambient sound, or musical scores. Kim intentionally avoided labeling the specific sources of each waveform, instead inviting the audience to interpret the forms abstractly, to consider the architecture of sound without relying on the hearing sense.
In interviews, Kim has emphasized that her work is not about converting sound into a visual form for the hearing, nor about simulating hearing for the Deaf. Rather, it is about occupying a space in between—an intersensorial field where meaning is constructed through texture, motion, and relational experience. The beaded sound waves do not play audio. They are quiet. But they resonate through the body and the eye, asserting the validity of non-auditory sound experience. Viewers are encouraged to walk slowly alongside the curtain, to observe the beads catch and reflect light, to note the subtle variations in material and structure. The installation often includes a pathway through the center, so that movement through the beads causes them to sway and softly clink together, creating an ambient soundscape activated only by the physical presence of the visitor. This feature introduces a feedback loop: the viewer, through motion, becomes the soundmaker.
The materials used in the installation were chosen not only for their visual properties but for their semiotic resonance. Some of the beads are made from recycled audio equipment—tiny fragments of magnetic tape, speaker wire, and headphone shells—cut and shaped into beads that literally embody the infrastructure of sound. Others were hand-painted with text or notation in American Sign Language gloss, incorporating the linguistic layer of Kim’s practice directly into the physical matrix of the work. These coded inclusions, visible only on close inspection, act like whispered annotations, or embedded metadata, infusing the installation with layers of meaning accessible only through extended engagement.
Beaded Sound Waves also functions as a political statement about visibility, access, and the standardization of communication. In reframing sound not as a force that must be heard but as one that can be seen, touched, and navigated, Kim challenges ableist assumptions about perception and linguistic authority. Her use of beadwork—a medium often associated with craft, gendered labor, and tactile intimacy—subverts dominant technologies of sound visualization, which are typically digital, abstract, and impersonal. Instead, Kim’s bead curtain is slow, physical, and deeply embodied. Each strand, strung by hand in laborious repetition, stands in contrast to the instantaneous rendering of sound by machines, asserting the legitimacy of time, care, and the tactile in sound interpretation.
In many ways, the piece recalls ancient uses of beads as tools of communication and memory—from prayer beads to tally strands to wampum belts. Kim activates this lineage not nostalgically but critically, showing that beads have long served as containers of information, culture, and rhythm. In her hands, the beaded wave becomes a score without sound, a memory without a source, a story told through motion, reflection, and relation. The physicality of the curtain asserts that sound, like language, is not only something we receive—it is something we shape, structure, and move through.
Christine Sun Kim’s Beaded Sound Waves marks a significant evolution in her practice, integrating her conceptual inquiries into sound, silence, and communication with the tactile, material language of fiber art. It invites viewers to slow down, to consider how sound might feel or look rather than how it might be heard, and to reimagine the boundaries between sensory modalities. In doing so, Kim transforms beadwork from decoration into declaration, a medium through which silence speaks, and sound becomes a shared, spatial presence rather than a fleeting auditory event. Her installation is not only a work of profound beauty and complexity, but a manifesto in beads—declaring that sound belongs to all bodies, in all the ways it can be known.