New paths in sound art

Her mother tongue is American Sign Language (ASL): the deaf-born artist Christine Sun Kim (*1980) dedicates her work to sound. She is fascinated by sound because, as she was told as a child, it is something she would never experience. But in her experimental and iterative work, Christine Sun Kim has found new ways of making clay tangible and sharing her life experiences. The exhibition Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night presents drawings, murals, paintings, video installations and sculptures from 2011 to the present. The exhibits are partly poetic, partly humorous or even political. The show opens on February 8 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and closes in July 2025, the exact date has not yet been announced.

Christine Sun Kim was born in Orange County near Los Angeles and has lived in Berlin since 2013. In her work, which also includes performance, she mixes several information systems such as body language, ASL, musical and graphic notation and transforms them structurally. For example, she reveals structural parallels between music and ASL. In addition, she uses sound to explore her own relationship to verbal languages and her environment. The artist is also known for her performance at Super Bowl LIV (2020), where she sang the US national anthem. Since then, the sung anthem has been accompanied by sign language every year.