At the Whitney Museum of America Art, sound artist Christine Sun Kim explores the Deaf experience with an exhibition that blends mediums and expands perspectives.
Art is born of a unique human experience. It is forged by trauma and triumphs and shared through various forms of communication. Thus, the art we make and how we perceive and interact with the world are inextricably linked. As a Deaf person, sound artist Christine Sun Kim experiences things in a way that may be different from others. Still, the art that stems from her interactions with the world is rich, complex, and expansive. In the first major museum survey of her medium-bending, multi-sensory work, Kim invites visitors to explore themes such as performance, society, self, and interaction as she experiences it. Weaving organically throughout the Whitney Museum of American Art, the exhibition encourages us to re-evaluate our understanding of life as a deaf person in a world that is not often facilitating.
Profoundly Deaf since birth, Kim is curious about harnessing the nuanced power of sound; she seeks to “[engage] sound and the complexities of communication in its various modes.” Using musical notation, infographics, her native American Sign Language (ASL), and written English, Kim “[explores] non-auditory, political dimensions of sound.” While stark in their aesthetic presentation, Kim’s work is a feast for the senses. She utilizes a variety of media: tangible, visual, and auditory. Her exploration of sound manifests in various art forms, including video, drawings, and sculpture. Spanning several floors, Kim’s work sneaks up on museumgoers as they pass through. There is a fluidity in the layout that mirrors stream-of-consciousness. The art greets you the way people and experiences will emerge as we move throughout our days and lives, illuminating the hardships, frustrations, and learning experiences that emerge for Kim as a Deaf person in a hearing world.
Without a visit to Level -1, patrons may miss A String of Echo Traps, 2022. Composed of three LED cubes suspended within the stairwell, the installation reverberates with black-and-white starburst animations and cosmic noises that recall a 1960s sci-fi special. To elevate the imagery, which depicts the ASL sign for “echo,” Kim called upon colleague Matt Karmil to compose an isolating, insular score that instills a trapped feeling in the viewer. Centering on the oppressions faced by Deaf people that “have reverberated through generations,” the sounds and visuals create a pervading unease that aptly reflects “the ongoing failure of societal structures to provide access and support for disabled people.” However, nestled in a place of transit, Kim suggests optimism for escape from this societal lethargy.
Kim proves that sound is more than auditory; it is also movement and visual. In Selby Square and Selby Circle, both 2011, the artist explores this translation between the audible and the physical. Filmmaker Todd Selby, for whom the two pieces are named, captured Kim as she conjured visual art through the movement using vibrations from speakers and subwoofers. Using paint-coated brushes placed upon wooden surfaces, the low-frequency noise emitted from the speakers acted like an artistic mind of its own. The process is like automatic art, but instead of coming from an artist’s subconscious, it comes from something inhuman, intangible altogether.
In 2013’s Courier as Courier, Kim draws allusions between her experiences with ASL interpreters and Castiglione’s Renaissance tale The Book of the Courier, in which merchants are thwarted in their attempts to communicate through interpreters. She leads a lecture in a gallery, relying on scrolling through texts on various iPads. By doing so, she risks the lecture being lost in translation, her clear intentions made murky, and her message fractured by the tedious process. With the performance, Kim “[…] questions the assumptions of truth and immediacy often ascribed to spoken language and the social capital propped up by those assumptions.”
All Day All Night also features traditional physical works, from charcoal and graphite on paper to glazed ceramics. Rending them from their traditional uses, Kim craftily employs disparate elements such as mathematical angles to convey an emotional interiority of her experience. With her 2018 series Degrees of Deaf Rage Concerning Interpreters (Terps), Kim weaponizes diagrams of angles as “[…] a personal coping mechanism and a prompt for institutional reflection and change.” Ranging from acute to 360, the artist gauges the rage she feels in situations complicated by her Deafness. Some are more generic frustrations faced by Deaf people; others are deeply personal: Kim felt “legit rage,” a right angle, at the Bard MFA program, and an “obtuse rage” at visiting artists who aren’t comfortable with interpreters. The series, like the exhibition as a whole, charts an autobiographical course through Kim’s life as both artist and Deaf person, offering sobering clarity about “systems that can be inaccessible and even hostile to Deaf and disabled people.”
Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Nyc, until July 6, 2025. All images courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
