The fan kicked on with a loud drone. A giant red hand flopped forebodingly over the tape meant to protect artworks from viewers, before lunging at me with an accusatory finger. As it filled with air — and while I caught my breath — the hand drifted calmly to a cream-colored rock, tapping it lightly, as if to say, That’s you. You’re dense as a rock. When it comes to Christine Sun Kim’s All Day All Night at the Whitney Museum of American Art, one could say that the word “viewer” falls a bit short. The exhibition is almost interactive in its potential to agitate (as exemplified by the admonishing finger of the above work, “ATTENTION,” 2022, by Kim and Thomas Mader). Through acts of translation that are alternatively hilarious, furious, and moving, Kim makes the air hum with the previously unperceived dimensions of ordinary things, from the physical pressure of bureaucratic power to the linework of movement to the music in everyday situations.
Those of us who understand multiple languages are fluent in the ways one can bounce off another, revealing latent qualities in each other and the world writ large. Kim, who is Deaf, often translates between American Sign Language (ASL) and American English in her works, which include drawings, sculptures, videos, and paintings. In the video “Palm Reader” (2020), for instance, she and Mader, a conceptual artist and frequent collaborator of Kim’s, animate the signs for various words related to authority, such as “state,” “constitution,” and “rule.” They demonstrate that each takes the form of a fingerspelled letter tapped at the top of the palm and then the bottom, recalling the doubled action of an official stamping an inkpad and then a document. This manifests the way that governments and other authoritative agencies invisibly but forcefully exert bureaucratic pressure via physical acts.
Indeed, Kim’s art not only foregrounds the ostensibly obvious but often under-considered fact that communication draws upon a vast universe of signs and formats, from facial expressions to graphs to etymologies — it also activates that knowledge in viewers. I found myself copying the motions of “Pointing” (2022), in which she translates the minute motion of fingers against the palm into black masses of charcoal that seem to bounce off the edges of the paper. These intimate drawings are blown up into massive wall murals, suggesting to me the kinetic energy of people in a room. As I turned, I saw the whirling eddies of exchanges between couples, friend groups, and strangers as they moved around each other on a crowded night.
Kim is particularly adept at the often disregarded communicative registers of humor and gossip. In the series Degrees of Deaf Rage (2018), for instance, she uses diagrams of mathematical angles to represent the feelings induced by various situations, punning on the words “right” and “reflex,” which describe both a type of angle and a kind of reaction. It’s the kind of rubric that is simple, flexible, relatable, and iterable, like a meme template or a slang term. Case in point: a visitor immediately picked up on it, telling her friend, “My obtuse rage would be traffic.” It helps that Kim is hilarious. I laughed aloud at the “locally sourced rock” listed in the medium line of the “ATTENTION” label, and in the pie chart “Why My Hearing Parents Sign” (2019), one of the wedges reads “SO THEY CAN TELL ME FAMILY SECRETS (THEY DON’T).”
Kim revels in translation not just between languages or systems of notation, but between concepts and feelings or experiences in works such as “How to Measure Loudness” and “How to Measure Quietness” (both 2014). In the former, she ranks “ASIAN FLUSH” above “SUBWAY ANNOUNCEMENT” but below “YELL AT TSA OFFICER,” suggesting a volume to physical discomfort. The latter work compares volume to psychological discomfort: She uses the musical notation “p,” denoting softness, to notate the silent treatment as “pppppppp” — the silence, one could say, is loud.
But Kim also deals in the limits and failures of such systems. In “Competing Languages I” (2020), two bent musical notes-as-staffs are stacked atop and facing away from each other, with the titular words nested on opposite sides, irreconcilable. She also draws attention to the exhaustion of communicating with hearing people in a world we constructed (“she is relentlessly… dedicated to sharing her Deaf lived experience with others,” the exhibition text says). In “Degrees of Deaf Rage Within Educational Settings” (2018), she points to the Kafkaesque condition of not being able to enroll in a class because it’s not popular enough among Deaf students for the school to employ an interpreter. In “Degrees of My Deaf Rage in the Art World” (2018), she calls out the art world — with “Guggenheim accessibility manager” being a particular source of rage.
But Kim’s most emotionally effective communicative instrument might be her hand, which she uses to produce lyrical, agitated, playful, and bittersweet tones, always with a signature smudginess that suggests variation and distortion. I think of those strokes and smears as her “voice” in this particular medium, and it’s often quivering with rage and hurt. Feedback, we know from “How to Measure Loudness,” is one of the most obtrusive sounds; in “Feedback Aftermath” (2012), the four-line staff vibrates violently. Misspellings indicate this rage as well: In “Degrees of Institutional Deaf Rage” (2018), she fills in an angle with choppy, almost angry overlapping strokes, captioning it with the words “ORGANGIZER [sic] NOT WILLING TO COMPENSATE INTERPRETERS FOR SOCIAL/ DINNER HOURS” in jagged letters.
I was struck by a peculiar quote from Kim embedded in the wall text beside the giant flopping hands of “ATTENTION.” The work, she says, is “trying to get one’s attention or bring attention to something forever.” Encoded in that odd and forceful word, “forever,” I sense fatigue and resignation — Sisyphus eternally pushing his fateful rock up a hill. But there’s also a plenitude, a boundless pool of potential, in the word. Indeed, from the inevitably messy translations and mistranslations between ASL and American English, between movement through space and the flat surface of the page, between the intensity of feeling and the simplicity of the smudged charcoal line, Kim’s work iterates — and reiterates, and reiterates — how wondrous, devastating, exhausting, not enough, too much, funny, and beautiful language can be.
and White Space)
Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night continues at the Whitney Museum of American Art (99 Gansevoort Street, West Village, Manhattan) through July 6. The exhibition was curated by Jennie Goldstein, Pavel Pyś, Tom Finkelpearl, Rose Pallone, and Brandon Eng.