Christine Sun Kim began working at the Whitney in 2007 as an educator, and later, as a consultant to establish the Whitney Signs program, which offers tours in ASL led by Deaf educators. In 2019, she was included in the Whitney Biennial, only to withdraw her work along with a number of other artists in protest of the vice chairman’s connection to Safariland, the company that produced the tear gas used at the US-Mexico border and against various protests. “All Day All Night,” the first major institutional survey of Kim’s work, opened at the museum this February. The title draws on the circling shape it makes when signed in ASL, and refers to the artist’s relationship with the institution coming full circle as well as to the communicative joy of Deaf people chatting “all day and all night.” Kim’s work, which spans performance, drawing, video, sculpture, and site-specific murals, draws on the dimensionality of ASL as well as musical notation, infographics, sound, and language to investigate the possibilities and politics of communication. In her capacity as an artist as well as an activist with a public platform, Kim is both relentless and witty in her push for access and accountability. For all its pointed commentary, her work is expansively generous. It begins with the sharing of Kim’s lived experiences, and reaches far beyond an art world into the actual and imagined spaces of our society and its future.
Olivia Parkes: How do you see the role of the artist in the institution? What part of that relationship do you most want to press?
Christine Sun Kim: I think museums are used to audience members being Deaf, or educators being Deaf, but they lack the resources for Deaf artists. I remember when I participated in “Soundings: A Contemporary Score,” a sound exhibition at MoMA in 2013, there were interpreters available for the talk I gave, but not at the reception afterwards. It feels like a perfect example of how many institutions and museums are not accustomed to disabled artists. Often, they have an accessibility budget set aside for audiences but not artists. So there’s a budget to make my work consumable, but the social part that allows me to interact is inaccessible. It was worse in the earlier stages in my career, but I’ve seen this at museums, at universities, at institutions at large. I’d like to see institutions take responsibility for all parts of their audiences, and to see less red tape around accessibility budgets, for them to become a permanent part of the operating budget.
OP: Your MoMA experience makes me think of your Degrees of My Deaf Rage in the Artworld (2018) drawings. Like the rest of the “Deaf Rage” works from that year, and the trauma drawings series from 2020, they combine the sensibility and humor of the cartoonist—that organic, animate line in your graphs and pie charts—with real anger. They deal with emotions that might be characterized as negative or isolating, but are so, so funny. How do you think about the role of humor in your work?
CSK: For me, humor is a survival mechanism. It’s a skill I’ve had to develop. When I left my Deaf bubble and was living in New York, I was quite afraid of hearing people, and sometimes they were afraid of me. I’d try to interact with strangers in bars, and on occasion, I’d encounter someone who simply could not understand what it would take to communicate with a person who doesn’t use speech, and they became stunned, just completely awkward. I found that the quickest way to get past that was humor.
I was always really angry as a kid, and having that anger doesn’t help. It’s something I get stuck with, and it doesn’t help me process my emotions. The Deaf community is full of rage, so much so that sometimes we don’t even know how to communicate it. At the start of my career, I refused to talk about it. But then I finally got to a place where I felt like my platform was large enough that I felt safe to talk about the Deaf experience. And then, boy, did I really share. I felt really pissed off, but humor helps people stay in the room. It allows there to be some dialogue. I feel like rage punches people in the face and then humor keeps them with you, and coming back for more.
OP: Humor is also a way of making something shared. Collaboration is key in your practice. It’s there even on the level of this conversation in that we’re speaking through Beth, an interpreter who you have a long relationship with. Has your understanding of collaboration shifted over time?
CSK: Collaboration started with my relationship with interpreters, who I worked with even before I was an artist. There’s a lot of trust involved, and a lot to navigate, especially around material you’d like to keep private. When I went to Bard for my MFA, I realized that I was only good at collaborating with interpreters, and that I hadn’t figured out how to collaborate with my classmates. This was read as me not knowing how to socialize properly, but I just hadn’t learned hearing behaviors. I made a lot of mistakes in the process of learning how to collaborate with artists, but it was through that collaboration that I finally learned how to live in a hearing world. So now, I have what I call “hearing people skills,” and I still have to practice them, constantly.
OP: Lately, you’ve also collaborated a lot with your family. Your husband, Tom Mader, an artist in his own right, worked with you on several videos and sculptures in the Whitney exhibition, and in 2023, a score your daughter Roux made on one of the pages of a collaborative book project created for “Cues on Point” at Secession in Vienna was made into a flag and flown over Somerset House during your residency there.
CSK: Family is such a huge part of my life. I don’t actually understand why so many artists keep it so separate from their work. It’s part of my everyday life. I collaborate with Tom a bunch, and we have a show for our duo practice coming up at Wellcome Collection in April in London. I’ve also let my kids into the process. Maybe some artists don’t want to get personal in that way.
OP: Yes, you now have two daughters. How has motherhood shaped your identity as an artist and also your relationship to sound?
CSK: My parents are both hearing, and my sister and I are both deaf. So growing up, we were two-and-two: equal. Then my partner Tom and I were one-on-one: equal. But then, my daughter Roux was born, and it became two-on-one, and then Dal was born, and now it’s three-on-one. My partner and two children are all hearing, and I’ve had to navigate some anxiety about it. I’ve noticed that Roux started to mimic my vocalizations. So I’ll yell at Tom in the way that I do, and she’ll copy my Deaf voice, and I’ll tell her, “Roux, stop it.” I sometimes find myself embarrassed by it, but it’s also interesting – she’s an extension of me, an extension of my voice. It has certainly impacted my relationship with sound. I think my family has developed more vocalization. Sometimes I’ll tell Roux to stop using her voice at home, and she says, “But Mom, you do.” I don’t even realize that I’ve started to do it, but when I’m drunk or excited or pissed off, my voice really comes out.
OP: I was at a restaurant recently, and it had this really loud, clubby music that seemed designed to stop me and my friend from really listening to each other. It made me think about a kind of addiction to noise in the hearing world. Noise is also, of course, a synonym for distraction. Do you think there’s anxiety in the hearing world around actually listening, or not being surrounded by noise?
CSK: Absolutely. Early in my career, I did a lot of video talks and interviews, and I always asked for captions with no voice over. And the providers said, “Oh, people won’t be able to focus. We at least need atmospheric sound.” I wanted people to know me without having to hear me through a different person’s voice. I wanted people to know me with their eyes instead of their ears, and having captions allows me to be more direct. I mean, with Sign Language, you’d be able to access me entirely directly. But there have been a lot of situations where I’m communicating with hearing people via text, and the lack of sound can almost feel hostile in some ways. Now that I live in Europe, I’ve also had the experience of people assuming that I don’t speak because I don’t speak English. I’m sure part of it is because I’m not white – I’m a “foreigner.” I do think that if I was Deaf and white, I would get a different response. Often, I have to use vocalization a little bit, just to get them to see my humanity in a way. I have to make sounds as a Deaf person for hearing people to take me seriously, which is a sign of something.
OP: The echo is a centrally recurring interest in your work. It appears in a number of your drawings as a graphic reference to the ASL sign for the word, some of which are sized up to murals, like the one you did for the atrium of the MMK – Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt: this big, bold image of sound hitting all four walls, as if trapped inside forever. I’m curious how you think about the metaphor of the “echo chamber” for a closed environment that doesn’t have a lot of exposure to external points of access, which is increasingly conjured to talk about the online world and our social and political worlds more broadly.
CSK: I call it an echo trap, but it’s the same concept. I usually speak about ableism in that context: it continues because people aren’t willing to allow new ideas in. And look, it exists in the Deaf community too, in part because there are not that many Deaf mentors. Ninety-five percent of Deaf people are born to hearing people, and there’s a huge lack of generational transmission of knowledge. For a long time, the Deaf community in the United States had a reputation for being terrible tippers –– this has changed, hopefully! My hypothesis here is that because the percentage of hearing parents learning Sign Language is so low, these conversations around small things, like how much to tip, don’t occur in a way that’s accessible to their Deaf children, and a lot of that incidental learning is lost. And with Deaf of Deaf families, sometimes it’s the trauma that gets passed down instead of knowledge, and that trauma is magnified by the faults in society, like those that cause many Deaf people to be unemployed and lack resources. That’s another form of echo trap.
OP: One of the ways I see your work in the social space is when it gets big. For example, you scale up your drawings into billboards or murals that activate the architecture of a city or building. What excites you about the possibilities of working with scale, and aboutf working with the built environment?
CSK: I think it’s the quality of everyday life. Because it’s so big It’s so visible–it’s outside of the institution. It seeps into people’s everyday lives, and I love that. I still meet people who say, “Oh, wow, you’re the first Deaf person I’ve ever met,” or “You’re my first Deaf friend.” And it’s 2025, right? Obviously, we still need to get the information out there that we exist. My practice has become a lot about reclaiming or claiming space for Deaf people, for the Deaf community to be a part of everyday life. I also like that my work doesn’t just resonate in the art community, but that it also resonates with a non-art community and society at large. I’m not interested in staying in the art echo chamber. I want out of that one.
