An Artist Expands the Landscape of Sound

Before I met the artist Christine Sun Kim at the Whitney Museum to talk about her new survey show, “All Day All Night,” her team sent me a copy of her two-page “access rider.” It contained a list of terms to avoid: Don’t pathologize her by referring to her as a “deaf artist,” and please don’t call her “inspirational.” It also offered resources on the distinction between small-d deaf (the audiological condition of not hearing) and big-D Deaf (the community that has emerged around the language of American Sign Language, or ASL).

The access document was born of necessity. “A big-time curator from a big-time museum was seeing my work for the first time, and I had to spend 45 minutes of the hourlong studio visit educating this curator about Deaf culture, leaving only 15 minutes to talk about my work,” she told me via her sign language interpreter Beth Staehle. “When this curator left, I was so mad.” At the same time, the document reflects her pragmatism and commitment to advocacy, including at the Whitney Museum itself, where she worked from 2007 to 2014, establishing Deaf-led programs and resources.

A lot has happened since her first days at the Whitney: two master’s degrees, a viral TED Talk, a move to Berlin, a marriage and two children, signing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the 2020 Super Bowl, and a thriving art career. Now she’s back at the museum, showing paintings, drawings, murals, videos, sculptures, sound pieces and even ceramics across three floors of the building.

The title of the show was chosen by its curators, Jennie Goldstein from the Whitney Museum, Pavel Pyś from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (where the show will travel) and Tom Finkelpearl, former commissioner of cultural affairs for New York City. Kim said the title is apt. “I’m quite obsessive about many things,” she said. “I’m obsessed about how I navigate the world. I’m obsessed about how to get what I need. These are things that are on my mind, being obsessed with them all day, all night.”

Kim’s work, the curators said in a recent interview, is often the first encounter museumgoers have with the question of what it is like to live in a hearing world as a Deaf person — with all the anger, frustration and, most strikingly when it comes to Kim’s work, the humor that it entails.

That is especially true of her best-known series, “Deaf Rage” (2018), which she said was a way to deal with the racism and isolation she experiences in her encounters with the hearing world. The charcoal drawings take the form of hand-drawn charts and diagrams: She uses different angles (acute, obtuse, reflex) to graph how much the art world, interpreters, traveling and other situations anger her. Some of them she presents as relatively minor, even hilarious, inconveniences (“Being offered a wheelchair at the arrival gate… and the Braille menu at restaurants”), while others inspire her full-on rage (“museums with zero deaf programming”).

“Deaf Rage” was shown in the 2019 Whitney Biennial until Kim, along with seven other participants, withdrew her work. The group was protesting against Warren Kanders, a member of the museum’s board, whose company supplied tear gas that was being used against migrants at the Mexican border during the first Trump administration. “To find out that the Whitney had a connection to selling tear gas — I couldn’t help but think, what if that was my kid?” Kanders resigned in the wake of the protests.

One of Kim’s obsessions is sound. After earning an M.F.A. in visual arts at the School of Visual Arts, she completed another in sound and music at Bard College in 2013. What may seem a counterintuitive topic for an artist who is deaf is anything but, Finkelpearl said. “Some of her work is the visualization of sound. What does it look like? What does it feel like? And the other is the politics of sound — how are people excluded based on sound and language?”

Kim said that she knows “how sound works, and what the expectations around it are.” “So why wouldn’t I use that in my work instead of rejecting it outright?” she added. “Sound isn’t part of my life, but when I found sound art, it became really interesting to me as a medium.”

Musical notations appear often in her work, sometimes in the form of drawings. In the Whitney exhibition, they show up in a mural that snakes around the walls of the eighth-floor galleries where the bulk of Kim’s work is installed. “I have to borrow my interpreters’ voices to communicate my ideas, to get my point across,” she said. “If I’m explaining or documenting Deaf experience, hearing people won’t understand it. But if I borrow music, something people do understand, then I can open them up to it.”

She uses infographics and the “action lines” one finds in comic book illustrations — marks that show the force of a punch or trembling fear or blaring noise, say — to the same ends. Until very recently, Kim had avoided using hands in her work, worrying that it was too much of a cliché. Instead, she transposes the movements that go into making ASL signs into seemingly abstract shapes. In her mural for the Queens Museum in 2022, she thought about signs that involved contact with the body and chose four of them to create a poem: “Time Owes Me Rest.” Cloudlike bursts and quivering lines give a sense of the physicality of sign language.

Another of Kim’s obsessions is the echo. The ASL sign for the word, which involves the fingers of one hand rebounding off the palm of the other, appears in many of her murals and drawings.

“The Deaf experience is so full of echoes because we never have full, direct access to the source,” Kim said. “We get information echoed through captions, through subtitles, through interpreters, through writing.”

Her interpreters know her so well, Kim said, that they’re more like collaborators. She will sometimes cue them to tell a certain story she has told many times before, or ask them to tidy up a sentence that she hasn’t expressed clearly enough.

“Some are better suited for my therapy sessions, some are better suited for social situations,” Kim said. “If I want an interpreter that’s going to make my joke sound funnier than it is, I’m going to pick an interpreter who can make my joke sound funnier than it is.”

Collaboration is crucial not only in how Kim communicates with the hearing world, but also with how she makes art. Her murals are also translated, in a sense: They are based on her smaller-scale drawings and transferred to the wall by the British artist Jake Kent, who lives in Berlin. Kent has developed techniques to replicate the smudges and other signs of her hand — not that different from the way her interpreters must convey her words as well as her intonation and other nuances of communication.

She also has a continuing artistic partnership with her husband, the German artist Thomas Mader. Mader is hearing; the couple has made a number of video works that grapple with the more intimate questions of communication across languages and cultures, and the divide between deaf and hearing worlds.

Early on, their relationship developed largely through writing. When Kim immigrated to Berlin, she said, “I couldn’t get over how we just had these really deep, intimate conversations over email, and then I see him in person, and he can barely sign. It’s not that he didn’t try, but people don’t use ASL in Germany — they use German Sign Language.”

Their 2016 video “Tables and Windows” grew out of cultural divides they faced. ASL depends as much on facial expressions as it does on hand movements, and in the beginning, Kim said, she had to get used to the fact that “his facial expressions were so German, like he was barely moving. We were having language breakdowns because of it.”

In “Tables and Windows,” you see them intertwined — Kim in front and Mader in back with his arms laced through hers, or vice versa — demonstrating the signs for a series of unlikely phrases, like “drop-leaf round pedestal table found in the street” or “a tiny window inside a massive door for the bouncer to look out into the street.” Whoever is in back does the hands and whoever is in front does the face and shoulders. “His face has really softened up since then,” she said.

These questions of intimacy and communication have only gotten more urgent with the arrival of their two daughters: Roux, in 2018, and Dal, in 2023, both of whom are hearing. “How much of my Deaf identity do I give them? I’m still figuring out how to have them be Deaf enough to connect with me,” Kim said. “It’s hard because I’m a Deaf mom, living in Germany, raising two kids who are going to have lives that are nothing like mine at all. So I really struggle with that.”

She has explored these questions in drawings like “Suggested Amount of Spoken Language With a Baby Whose Parents Communicate in Sign Language” (2018). P’s (standing for piano, the musical notation meaning softly — the more p’s, the softer) and half notes and quarter notes chart a daily “sound diet” ensuring that her daughter is not confined to the hearing world. In another work, a sound piece called “One Week of Lullabies for Roux” (2018), Kim asked friends to create music for her child and corresponding audio descriptions for herself.

Then there’s the question of Kim’s relationship to her Korean American heritage. She grew up in Orange County, Calif., the child of immigrant parents. Her younger sister is also deaf. Her parents learned to sign, she said, “but there wasn’t always clear communication.”

“My white hearing teachers would tell my mom not to teach me Korean because they thought it would confuse me,” she said. “So my parents weren’t always able to transmit their language and culture to me.”

In the past five years, Kim has been trying to connect more closely with that Korean culture through what she calls its “physical” aspects — food, celebrating holidays and other traditions. She has also become an active member of GYOPO, a Los Angeles-based collective of diasporic Korean artists and arts professionals.

“It was important for Christine to think about who has access to our events and conversations, whether it’s because you’re deaf and there’s no ASL, or because of socio-economic or geographic reasons,” said Christine Y. Kim, one of the group’s founders and a curator at large at the Tate.

For the artist Carolyn Lazard, who, like Kim, was named an inaugural Disability Futures Fellow in 2019 by the Ford and Mellon Foundations, it’s precisely this expansive thinking that makes Kim’s work so exciting. “It coalesces notation, the concept of musicality, the pictorial, the sonic in a way that for me feels kind of like the world expanding,” Lazard said. “And she’s doing that alongside being an incredible advocate for Deaf culture, and having to do an incredible amount of work to have her art be intelligible as art.”

All Day All Night

Through July 6, Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, Manhattan; 212-570-3600, whitney.org.