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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 looks into her mind, memory, family, relationships with those around her, and her roots, presenting forty shaped canvas paintings and drawings in a rhythmic visual arrangement.
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.
Moon Mind extends this line of inquiry while shifting Kim’s focus from social structures toward her own interior world. While her earlier works often foregrounded a critical engagement with the norms of a hearing-centric society and the histories of the Deaf community, the works in this exhibition treat the mind as a spatial form, giving it shape, weight, and a sense of proximity. Kim explores shifting emotions and memories through her relationships with herself, her family, her children, friends, and those around her. Through the experiences of becoming a mother, building a family, and seeing her language and work reach wider audiences, Kim begins to treat the form of the mind in a more playful and experimental way. Her focus, once directed toward social structures and the power relations embedded in language, deepens in this exhibition toward the personal mind, family, intimate relationships, and layers of time and memory, opening a new direction in her practice.
The shaped canvas paintings presented for the first time in this exhibition take the form of diptychs composed of an upper and a lower canvas. Continuing her recent Mind series, Kim develops this new body of canvas works by exploring the possibility of translating the mind into spatial and sculptural form. Depending on shifting emotional states, one’s mind may feel closer to or farther from another mind, a memory of the past, or an object such as the moon. Attentive to this fluid state of mind, Kim positions the mind and the object it encounters across the upper and lower canvases, using the distance between them to suggest shifting psychological proximity. The distance between the upper and lower canvases can change, suggesting the mind’s constantly shifting state.
The work Moon Mind , from which the exhibition takes its title, carries multiple layers of meaning that emerged as Kim reflected deeply on 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 embraces a body of work that begins with the artist’s inner world and expands toward family, memory, cultural roots, and relationships with other minds.
The surface of the paintings also plays an important role in the exhibition. Just as charcoal leaves natural smudges and stains in Kim’s works on paper, the canvas works create another kind of trace. Kim builds up deep blues and greens through swirling brushwork, creating surfaces so dark they appear almost black, yet layered with depth. Unlike earlier works that often conveyed meaning clearly through text and symbols, the works in this exhibition allow color, brushwork, and the material qualities of paint to operate as a new visual language, revealing Kim’s inner world and sensibility. This shift and expansion also carries into the drawings made with acrylic paint. During her 2025 residency at the American Academy in Rome, Kim began experimenting with acrylic on paper, exploring the movement of the brush, the density of paint, and the ways it spreads and layers on the surface. In this acrylic series, words such as “Mind,” “Land,” “Mass,” “Tap,” “Touch,” and “Still” come together with arched lines, moving the work in a more abstract direction. Rather than guiding viewers toward one definitive interpretation, the works invite them to trace how the mind lands, touches memory, lingers in repetition, and gradually fades.
The exhibition also includes works that borrow musical dynamics, used to indicate volume in music, to visualize states of mind and the movement of time. Kim uses “p,” for “piano,” meaning to play softly, and “f,” for “forte,” meaning to play loudly, as signs for mapping states of mind and temporal direction. Here, p also refers to the past, connecting to roots, family, and home. As the number of ps increases, so does the weight of the past and the depth of time. By contrast, f refers to the future, connecting to energy, activity, speed, the unknown, and anxiety. The arched lines in the works evoke both the mind and land, while also suggesting the passage of time, in which a state continues and returns. Kim approaches the mind as a three-dimensional space and psychological terrain, using the arch to show how the sensations of the past, family, home, and homeland take root and accumulate within it. The softness or steepness of each arch reveals the rhythm and intensity of a mind moving through time, suggesting a motion that recedes and returns.
In Moon Mind , Christine Sun Kim brings together shaped canvases and drawings, musical dynamics and written language, and arched lines to present the mind not as a fixed state, but as a space in continual motion through time, relationships, and memory. Across the exhibition, the mind encounters the moon, land, the past, family, and other minds, creating different senses of distance, speed, and intensity. As viewers move through the exhibition, these elements form a visual rhythm of distance, return, and transformation, allowing viewers to sense how the mind’s relationships to others, to memory, and to itself continue to shift.