Resonations

Christine Sun Kim’s first job out of grad school in 2007 was as an educator at the Whitney Museum, where she was hired as an educator in part to advise on resources for Deaf visitors. Now, the artist, 44, is basking in the triumphant moment of her survey “All Day All Night” at the very same institution. Nearly two decades on, the role of “educator” has remained a through-line for Kim—even though it’s one she admits comes with some ambivalence.

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“A lot of Deaf people are innately educators. We're always teaching people how to do this, how to do that, how to sign this, how to sign that,” she says through her longtime interpreter, Beth Staehle. “I don't necessarily mean this in a good way—we spend a lot of our lives navigating through society, teaching people how to engage with us. That also means we usually get less time to be creative and create our own work.”

Much of Kim’s oeuvre indeed has a didactic quality in how many of her pieces shed light on aspects of American Sign Language. As with the best teachers, Kim’s glittering wit makes her lessons all the more effective. The drawing No Way, Finish, 2018, highlights how the English phrases “No way,” and “I did,” and “Stop,” and “Quit it,” and “Knock it Off,” and “Too much” and “Nooo” are all expressed in A.S.L. with roughly the same hand sign, the one for “Finish.” What we, as hearing viewers, are meant to learn is that the distinct meaning of the sign is dependent on contextual cues along with facial and other bodily expressions. The two-channel video Tables and Windows, 2016, stars Kim and her husband, the artist Thomas Mader, jointly signing pointedly distinctive descriptions of tables and windows (e.g., “concrete outdoor table with a built-in chessboard”). The scripts were inspired by an exercise used to teach sign language, wherein hearing students practice describing tables or windows in detail. “A hearing person would struggle to describe something like that visually,” says Mader, who is hearing, and learned sign language from scratch after meeting Kim. “What about the surface? Is it old, is it new? Is it smooth, or does it have edges? That’s what a good American Sign Language speaker does, is give you all these details and nuances.” 

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Another recurring trope in her practice is the personal narrative-driven infographic. Shit Hearing People Say to Me, 2019, is a pie graph divided into equal slices with labels like, “Can you feel music? (Putting hands on the floor)” and “You’re smart for a Deaf person.” Call-out works such as these elicit giggles as I imagine the infuriating ridiculousness of such goings-on from Kim’s point of view—along with a slightly self-conscious mental audit that I’d never act like those hearing people. Her “Rage” series, from 2018, illustrates degrees of anger felt by herself and others she surveyed in the Deaf community at various real-life circumstances, rendered as geometric angles: “Tech students with no relationship to the Deaf community create prototypes like signing gloves and reach out later just to test on us” hits 180 degrees; while “Getting hit in the head with a bag of peanuts by a flight attendant who tries to get our attention” clocks in at right under 270.

Hearing people will surely walk away with new insights. But that doesn’t change the reality that Kim never asked to be in the position of some art-world-specific ambassador representing the Deaf community. “I want that kind of privilege to sit and think about things and not think about deafness all the time,” she says. “That is the challenge, being deaf and using A.S.L. as such a specific experience and life that not everyone understands.”

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When the more explicit focus on her deafness fades into the background, other themes in Kim’s practice come to the fore. For one, compelling autobiographical threads emerge, from anecdotes to stories of deeper bonds. Woven throughout “All Day All Night” are nods to her relationship with Mader and the pair’s dynamic straddling the Deaf and hearing worlds, which they’ve navigated ever since first meeting at a bar in 2012. One of the largest-scale—and most conspicuous—pieces on view is ATTENTION, 2022, consisting of two huge red nylon arms inflated and violently waved about by industrial-strength blowers, pointing toward a single central rock. These are incredibly loud, drowning out all nearby conversation. The concept arose out of a disagreement after Mader didn’t alert Kim to a curb while the two were on a walk and she was in the middle of signing something. “She was like ‘You are my co-pilot,’” recalls Mader. “‘If I’m signing, the responsibility is on you to alert me to anything that’s in my way, or anything where I could trip.’ I didn’t get it at the time." The sculpture came from “thinking about different ways of getting attention in sign language,” he continues. “If somebody’s in your vicinity, but they’re not necessarily paying attention to you, you do this”—he waves his hands, imitating the motion of the nylon arms—”and the more frantic the movement gets, the more urgent your plea.”

There is much to consider, too, in how Kim plays with the physical forms of both English and A.S.L— namely, letters and signing. Her stark charcoal drawings evoke Christopher Wool or some of Richard Prince’s text works, while the labeled graphic components channel the Guerrilla Girls, activist bent and all. When I ask about other text-involved artists to whom she feels an affinity, she brings up Ed Ruscha: “He’s really good at deconstructing every letter,” she says. In her series “Future Base,” 2016, consisting of 20 drawings, the word “future” becomes a versatile character represented by a line tracing the A.S.L. hand-sign for the word, made by slicing a flat hand from your forehead outward: In No Future, the line twists into the anarchist “A” symbol. In Future Does the Biles, the line bounces off the ground and twists into ascending loops. In Good Grief Future, the line mimics the zig-zag on Charlie Brown’s shirt. Similarly riffing off the gesture-language of A.S.L is the exhibition’s titular work All Day All Night, 2023, which depicts the cumulative silhouette of someone signing “all day” and then “all night.”

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Musical notations make frequent appearances in other compositions, with Kim finding them to be the “most effective way to communicate my deaf ideas and experiences.” A mural, Ghost(ed) Notes, 2024/2025, reveals a score, but the notes look to be doing everything they can to avoid touching the staff. Therein lies a metaphor for Kim’s personal arc—she’s felt at times ghosted by the hearing world and at other times has felt the same urge. “Growing up, I was ghosting sound, pretending like it wasn't there,” she says. “I've stopped. I realized I have to face the truth.”

In 2020, Kim was invited to the Superbowl as the sign-language interpreter for the national anthem and “America the Beautiful.” To her dismay, the broadcast cut away from her for all but a few seconds. A video on view, Cues on Point, 2022, consists of two videos of Staehle that capture the interpreter—who had been on the field to convey the lyrics in real-time to Kim—signing the pre-planned cues to both songs in front of a blank background as the A.S.L. translations scroll across the screen. Watching Staehle, it’s quickly made manifest how different these two familiar songs seem when one cannot hear the lyrics.

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And this poetic but imprecise exercise—of translating noise designed for the hearing—ties into yet another key theme: echoes, which Kim uses as an analogy to characterize how she receives her impressions of the world. “A lot of our life has repetition,” says Kim, speaking of Deaf people generally. “Beth is echoing what I'm saying right now. She echoes what you say. There's a lot of echo happening. She's going to echo what Tom is saying to me at times. There's a lot of repetition, and I don't usually get the information directly from the original source.” Though this roundabout way of communication is the norm for her when interfacing with hearing people, the messaging feels rather crystal clear when Kim is reaching out the other way. Her work offers a direct line to her reflections, musings, and experiences—leaving an indelible impression that goes beyond words.

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‍“Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night” is on view through July 6, 2025, at the Whitney Museum of Art at 99 Gansevoort St, New York, NY 10014.