Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night
Whitney Museum of American Art
Feb 8–July 6, 2025
Artists are often credited with creating works that allow viewers to know more about themselves through shared experiences. The ability to hit upon a universality is a rare talent. That is why the work of Christine Sun Kim stands out. As a member of both the Deaf and Korean-American communities, her perspective comes from what disability arts scholar Simi Linton calls the “vantage point of the atypical,” meaning that an outside perspective can offer a more complete picture.
Kim has navigated the world with a specific aural and visual identity. As a child in California, she was raised in a large Korean community, then while living in New York, she felt accustomed to its diversity. It wasn’t until Kim relocated to Germany that her otherness as a Korean person came to the fore. “Having moved to Germany and being an immigrant here, I see what they see. I’m perceived as Asian first and Deaf second. That’s been new to me and odd.”[1]
These experiences of otherness help Kim create works about disconnectedness and removal. Coupled with her background (admittedly brief) in graphic design, the works on paper that largely populate the exhibition are starkly black and white with simple lettering and succinct visual language. Christine Sun Kim is generous in bridging the gap between the hearing world and the deaf community. She meets us more than halfway by giving us written words, hugely expressive visual language, blunt messaging, and humor. Inspired by the universal language of infographics, she seeks to communicate about the difficulty of communication.
Primarily a sound artist, Kim’s two works, How to Measure Loudness and How to Measure Quietness (both 2014), show sound descriptions as graduated lists using the music cues ƒ and p as units of measure. The baseline for loudness is “sleep” which then works its way up to “Asian flush” then to “Yelling at TSA Officers” to “Voice lost to oblivion.” In Quietness, we begin with “sleep” moving to “unimportance” and landing on “pania.” Here Kim is giving us descriptors about what is loud and quiet, not in sound but in the amount of occupied space.
Speaking of occupied space, All Day All Night has been generously given three floors of the museum and a floating installation in the stairwell for her digital animation, A String of Echo Traps (2022). This piece expands on the ASL sign for echo (one hand represents a wall and remains stationary while the other hand mimics the movement of sound bouncing off of it). As the visual representation of echo (amorphic black blobs) reverberates across the screen, they continually bounce and regenerate, thus creating an endless loop or a trap. The trap represents both the Ableist society’s unwillingness to accommodate others and the deaf community’s cyclical oppression.
Kim’s site-specific works thankfully break out from the confines of that limited space but still reference the idea of the echo. Her third floor installation, Prolonged Echo (2025) shows large sloping arcs, punctuated with the words OWE and HAND PALM, referencing the ASL gesture that is used in signing this word. The viewer is surrounded by an arrangement of peaks, valleys, darkness, and light. Language as movement and then as a monument.
The first floor houses a kinetic piece created collaboratively with her partner, Thomas Mader, entitled ATTENTION (2022). Here, we meet two inflatable hands and arms, both reaching out intermittently to a stone that appears to have eroded through the repetition of movement. One hand has been shaped into a pointing finger and the other reaches with its palm facing down, both gestures used in the deaf community in order to gain someone’s attention. Its cyclical motion implies that that action goes on forever.
Time plays a part in Kim’s work, in terms of scoring and in the more abstract ideas of all day, all night, and the future. The artist’s two pieces from earlier in her career, All. Day. and All. Night. (both 2012), are drawings of arced lines that depict the ASL signs for each, the “day” drawing in black and the “night” drawing in red. These are accompanied by a shaped canvas (2023) that depicts both together. As one signs these phrases, one arm acts as a horizon line while the other moves from one side to the other, like the sun circumnavigating the earth. The emptiness of the canvas creates a negative space that acts in concert with the high contrast of her works. These are spaces waiting to be filled or reminders of what’s missing.
As Kim evolves as an artist and a human, her newer identities as a partner and a parent have begun to inform her work. One Week of Lullabies for Roux (2018) is an interactive piece whose origin springs from her desire to have some connection and control over her child’s “sound diet.” The artist asked friends and colleagues to compose lullabies for her daughter, emphasizing low-frequency tones. Kim then paired the seven songs with color-coded seating resembling a pill box, a medicinal marking of the days of the week, but also a representation of time moving forward in these small, almost unnoticeable increments.
Ghost(ed) Notes (2024), a site-specific installation on the 8th floor, shows empty staff lines (a recurring theme), carefully avoiding the notes trying to occupy them. It’s the visual representation of a request met with silence and rose from the artist’s frustration with ignored requests for adequate interpretation and the lack of support for people in the deaf community. While the world continues to be biased toward hearing, Kim’s work reminds us that those who exist in intersectionality are uniquely equipped to show us lapses in time, judgment, and history. The viewer can connect with Kim’s work by acting as visual instigators, probing us to question our relationship to language, its promise, and its meaning.
[1] Humor Humanizes, Christine Sun Kim in Dialogue. Christine Sun Kim All Day All Night (Whitney Museum, 2025), exhibition catalog.
