Issue

Of Sound and Identity: Christine Sun Kim

Of Sound and Identity: Christine Sun Kim
Installation view of CHRISTINE SUN KIM’s Ghost(ed) Notes, 2024, vinyl and steel frame mural, dimensions variable, at the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, 2024. Photo by Jueqian Fang. Courtesy the artist; François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles/New York; and White Space, Beijing.

Christine Sun Kim’s solo exhibition “All Day All Night” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York resisted the conventions of a midcareer survey. Instead of tracing a career arc, it immersed viewers in a dense spatial and conceptual vocabulary. Comprising 95 works made between 2011 and the present, the show brought together charcoal drawings, murals, video installations, and sculptures, all orbiting a central theme: sound as social currency. Kim, a Berlin-based American artist who is Deaf, confronts how sound can be wielded for power, privilege, and exclusion.