Christine Sun Kim

This volume surveys Christine Sun Kim’s works across painting, sculpture, drawing, moving image, performance, large-scale murals and collaborations with other artists made between 2011 and 2024. Kim’s practice considers how sound operates in society, deconstructing the politics of sound and exploring how oral languages operate as social currency. Identifying as Deaf and Korean American, Kim draws on musical notation, written language, infographics, American Sign Language (ASL) and the use of the body, strategically deploying humor to examine communication with her family and her community and to create new channels of dialogue with wide audiences.
Published alongside the traveling exhibition, All Day All Night is brimming with supplementary texts from curators, artists and scholars, including an interview between Christine Sun Kim and exhibition curators Tom Finkelpearl, Jennie Goldstein and Pavel S. Pys; scholarly contributions by Seth Kim-Cohen, Jeffrey Yasuo Mansfield and Park McArthur; and an intimate artist timeline compiled by Brandon Eng and Rose Pallone. A substantial plate section follows these enriching text contributions.
Christine Sun Kim (born 1980) is an American artist based in Berlin. Her work explores her relationship to spoken and signed languages, to her built and social environments and to the world at large. Kim has exhibited and performed internationally, including at the Queens Museum, New York (2022); the Drawing Center, New York (2022); Whitney Biennial, New York (2019); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2019); and the Art Institute of Chicago (2018).

In this monograph, the groundbreaking work of the American-born, Berlin-based artist Christine Sun Kim (born 1980) is explored through essays, short texts and reflections, an interview and abundant large-scale images of Kim's work. An artist who foregrounds the visual, physical and political dimension of sound, Kim challenges the notion that sound is solely an auditory experience. Kim, whose first language is American Sign Language (ASL), uses elements from various information systems, such as musical notation, infographics and ASL, to develop a dryly humorous visual vocabulary in a variety of mediums, including performance, drawing, video, lectures and more. She aims to draw attention to the power imbalances between the hearing world and the Deaf community, as well as to celebrate the generative possibilities and creative energy that can arise from interactions between people with different positionalities and modes of communication.