Kim spent much of her life mirroring others' relationships to sound in an effort to follow a culturally dominant "sound etiquette." Growing up animated in a less effusive Korean family (a facet, she points out, of both Korean and hearing cultures), Kim learned quietness—"to tone it down"—in response to eyes upon her. "At first I thought I experience sound mostly through vibrations, but I realized it's much more than that," she explains. "I'm mostly informed by the way people react and behave around it and then I in turn mirror them, sometimes out of good manners." In her artistic practice, Kim strives to reclaim sound, to carve out a space where sound doesn't revolve around some borrowed etiquette, but instead around her own distinct experience.
Avant-garde composer John Cage declared sound to be the most public of senses, and it hasn't been a private experience for Kim. To the contrary, she describes the deaf community as a "collective culture." Built through a shared experience of sound and language, the deaf community has its own sound etiquette: for example, the artist explains, if someone joins a table, it is customary that people move back their chairs to let the newcomer in without looking up, so those at the table can continue to watch whomever is signing. Regardless of her audience, a predilection for the communal is in Kim's nature, and her art is frequently collaborative and participatory. "I often collaborate with others in order to make my voice known or relevant," she says. "People are almost an extension of myself, namely sign language interpreters."
Collaboration was integral to Kim's recent sonic performance piece Fingertap Quartet. In putting together the piece, the artist provided a list of 12 specific sounds to her musician friend, Dev Hynes of Blood Orange (a later version featured voice samples by Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu). Kim remarks: "I trusted [Dev] enough to make voice samples based on my instructions and I did not ask anyone to double-check for me. Conceptually, I leased his voice." Using the voice samples, an audio recorder, a laptop, and transducers, Kim created four sound files. With projected text, she communicated the concept underlying each sound file to her audience: "Like/Good," a sound you like and think is good; the converse sound, "No Like/No Good"; "Like/No Good," a sound you like but suspect might not be good; and a sound you don't like but suspect might not be good, "No Like/Good.