Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night

Using musical notation, infographics, and language—both in Kim's native American Sign Language (ASL) and written English—she has produced drawings, videos, sculptures, and installations that often explore non-auditory, political dimensions of sound.

Kim frequently draws directly on the spatial dynamism of ASL, translating it into graphic form. In recent years, she has explored the notion of the echo in drawings, videos, and murals, including Prolonged Echo (2023), which is presented across multiple walls at the Whitney. The arching black forms derive from the shape of the sign for “echo”—four fingers of one hand contact the open palm of the other and then move away in a motion resembling an illustration of an echoing sound wave. For Kim, being denied access to the originating source of information is similar to the idea of an echo without its start. Communication with hearing people—whether with sign language interpreters as intermediaries or through writing—inevitably results in time lags, repetition, and the potential for distorted meaning. The layering of the works on this floor—her charcoal drawings placed over her site-responsive mural—reflects on a perspective of the world she has described as “just one big echo. Or rather, maybe, just small echoes that become one big echo.”