Christine Sun Kim

American artist Christine Sun Kim (born 1980) has developed a unique visual language incorporating musical notation, body language and American Sign Language to create a singular body of multidisciplinary work channeling her experiences and traumas navigating a hearing world. This publication interweaves hundreds of archival photographs with expanded captions by the artist to create a book that is both deeply personal and wide-reaching in its investigation of deaf imagery in mainstream culture from the last half century. Kim’s photographs document a broad range of what she has coined “deaf artifacts,” spanning from pop culture imagery that appropriates Deaf culture to internet memes created by members of the Deaf community to disability signage and vernacular pamphlets to personal ephemera collected throughout her life. This vast personal archive has been organized into thematic sections, including “Celebrity ASL,” “Call and Wait,” “lnterepters” and “Parking lots,” while also teasing out subtler connections through recurring visual patterns and motifs. In addition to drawing from Kim’s personal collection of photographs, the book incorporates images from the institutional archives of Gallaudet University, the world’s first higher education institution for Deaf and hard of hearing students.

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).

Published with Tang Museum, CAG, Gund, and Remai Modern.

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.