Before I met the artist Christine Sun Kim in the Whitney Museum to talk about her new survey show “All Day All Night”, her team sent me a copy of her two-sided “Access Rider”. It contained a list of terms to avoid them: do not pathologize them by calling them a “deaf artist”, and please do not call them “inspiring”. It also offered resources for the distinction between small-d hearing (the audiological state of the non-hearing) and the big-D hearingess (the community that arose for the language of American sign language or ASL).
The access document was born out of necessity. “A big curator of a large museum saw my work for the first time and I had to spend 45 minutes after the hourly studio to raise this curator through the deaf culture, and only left 15 minutes to talk about my work. She told me about her sign language, Beth Staehle. “When this curator went, I was so crazy.” At the same time, the document reflects its pragmatism and its commitment to the advocacy group, also in the Whitney Museum itself, where it worked from 2007 to 2014 and built deaf programs and resources.
A lot has happened since their first days in the Whitney: two master's degrees, a viral Ted talk, a move to Berlin, a marriage and two children who signed “The Star Spangled Banner” in the Super Bowl 2020 and a flourishing art of career . Now she is back in the museum and shows paintings, drawings, murals, videos, sculptures, sound pieces and even ceramics on three floors of the building.
The title of the show was selected by the curators Jennie Goldstein from the Whitney Museum, Pavel Pyś from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (where the show trips) and Tom Finkelpearl, former commissioner for cultural affairs for New York City. Kim said the title was suitable. “I'm pretty obsessed with a lot of things,” she said. “I am obsessed with how I navigate through the world. I am obsessed with how I can get what I need. These are things that are in my head and are obsessed all day all night. “
Kim's work, according to the curators, in a recently carried out interview, is often the first encounter, which museum goers have with the question of what it is like to live in a hearing world as a deaf – with all the anger, frustration and the striking one It is surrounded by Kim's work, the humor that it brings.
This applies in particular to her best -known series “Deaf Rage” (2018), who said that she was a way to deal with racism and isolation that she experiences in her encounters with the hearing world. The charcoal drawings have in the form of hand -drawn diagrams and diagrams: it uses different angles (acute, stump, reflex) to grapple how much the art world, interpreter, travel and other situations are upset. Some of them present them as relatively minor, even funny, inconvenience (“offer a wheelchair at the arrival gate … and the Braille menu in restaurants”), while others inspire their full anger (“Museums with Zero Deaf programming”). .
“Deaf Rage” was shown in the 2019 Whitney Biennale until Kim with seven other participants withdrew her work. The group protested against Warren Kanders, a member of the museum board, whose company delivered tear gas, which was used during the first Trump government against migrants on the Mexican border. “To find out that the Whitney had a connection to the sale of tear gas – I couldn't help but think about what if my child was?” Kanders resigned after the protests.
One of Kim's obsession is the sound. After earning an MFA in visual arts on the School of Visual Arts, she completed another in Sound and Music on Bard College in 2013. What an artist who is deaf is anything but a contraguitive topic, said Finkelpearl. “Some of her work are the visualization of the sound. How does it look? How does it feel? And the other is the policy of sound – how are people based on sound and language? “
Kim said that she knows “how sound works and what the expectations around her are.” “Why shouldn't I use it in my work instead of rejecting it directly?” added it. “Sound is not part of my life, but when I found sound art, he became really interesting for me as a medium.”
Musical notations often appear in their work, sometimes in the form of drawings. In the Whitney exhibition, they appear in a murals that meanders around the walls of the galleries on the eighth floor, in which the majority of Kim's work is installed. “I have to borrow the voices of my interpreters to communicate my ideas and convey my point of view,” she said. “If I explain or document deaf experiences, it will not understand that people don't understand it. But if I borrow music, I understand something, I can open it. “
It uses infographics and the “action lines” that can be found in comic illustrations – markings that show the power of a blow or trembling fear or sharp noise – at the same ends. Until recently, Kim had avoided using hands in her work and feared that it was too much cliché. Instead, she turns the movements that make ASL signs into apparently abstract forms. In her murals for the Queens Museum in 2022, she thought about signs of contact with the body and chose four of them to create a poem: “Time owes me.” Cloud -like bursts and trembling lines convey a feeling for them Physicality of sign language.
Another of Kim's obsession is the echo. The ASL sign for the word that contains the fingers of a hand that bounces off the hand surface of the other appears in many of its murals and drawings.
“The deaf experience is so full of echoes because we never have a complete, direct access to the source,” said Kim. “We receive information that can be reproduced by subtitles, through interpreters, by writing.”
They know their interpreters so well, said Kim that they are more like employees. Sometimes she will appeal to her to tell a certain story that she has told many times, or ask you to clean up a sentence that she has not clearly expressed.
“Some are better suited for my therapy sessions, others are better suited for social situations,” said Kim. “If I want an interpreter who will sound my joke funnier than it is, I will choose an interpreter that can sound my joke than he.”
The collaboration is not only crucial for how Kim communicates with the hearing world, but also with how it makes art. In a sense, their murals are also translated: they are based on their smaller drawings and are brought to the wall by the British artist Jake Kent, who lives in Berlin. Kent has developed techniques to replicate the smudges and other signs of their hand – not as different from the way their interpreters have to convey their words as well as their intonation and other communication nuances.
She also has a continuous artistic partnership with her husband, the German artist Thomas Mader. Mader hears; The couple did a series of video work that deal with the more intimate questions of communication between languages and cultures and the gap between deaf and hearing worlds.
Most of her relationship developed early on by writing. When Kim immigrated to Berlin, she said: “I couldn't get over how we had this really deep, intimate conversations about e -mails, and then I see him personally and he can hardly sign. It is not that he didn't try, but people do not use ASL in Germany – they use the German sign language. “
Her video “Tables and Windows” 2016 was created from cultural differences with which they were confronted. Asl depends on the facial expressions as before movements, and at the beginning, said Kim, she had to get used to the fact that “his facial expressions were as German as if he were hardly moving. So we had language closures. “
In “tables and windows” they look at them intertwined and Mader in the back with the arms that are laced through their, or vice versa for a number of unlikely phrases such as “drop-leaf round round table found in the Street “or” a small window in a massive door so that the bouncer looks on the street. “Those who are in the back do their hands and who is in front, make their face and shoulders.” His face has really softened since then, “she said.
These questions of intimacy and communication have only become more urgent with the arrival of their two daughters: Roux in 2018 and DAL in 2023, both of whom hear. “How much of my pigeon identity do I give you? I still find out how you are deaf enough to connect me with me, ”said Kim. “It is difficult because I am a deaf mother who lives in Germany and raises two children who will have life that are nothing with me at all. So I really fight with it. “
She examined these questions in drawings such as “proposed quantity of spoken language with a baby whose parents communicate in sign language” (2018). PS (stand for piano, the musical notation, which means quietly – the more horsepower, the softer) and half notes and quarter notes a daily “sound diet” to ensure that your daughter is not limited to the audio world. In another work, a sound of a sound called “One Week Lullabies for Roux” (2018), Kim asked friends, music for her child and corresponding audio descriptions for yourself.
Then the question of Kim's relationship with her Korean American heritage is. She grew up in Orange County, California, the child of parents with a migration background. Her younger sister is also deaf. Her parents learned to sign, she said: “But there was no clear communication.”
“My white -hearing teachers would tell my mother that she shouldn't teach me Korean because they thought it would be confused,” she said. “So my parents could not always send their language and culture to me.”
In the past five years, Kim has tried to link this Korean culture closer by calling his “physical” aspects – eating, holidays and other traditions. She is also an active member of Gyopo, an Los Angeles -based collective of Diasporic Korean Artists and Arts Professionals.
“For Christine it was important to think about who has access to our events and conversations, be it that they are deaf and there are no asl, or because of socio -economic or geographical reasons,” said Christine Y. Kim, one of the The founders of the group and a curator in the act.
For the artist Carolyn Lazard, who, like Kim 2019, was appointed as an opening -Futh -Futh -futh -Futhes, like Kim 2019, it is exactly this extensive thinking that makes Kim's work so exciting. “It writes notation, the concept of musicality, the picture, the Sonic in a way that somehow feels like the world for me,” said Lazard. “And she does this alongside the incredible lawyer for the deaf culture and has to do an incredible amount of work so that her art is understandable as art.”
All night all day
Until July 6th, Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, Manhattan; 212-570-3600, Whitney.org.