Art review: Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night

'All Day All Night' is 'the first major museum show to allow an artist confronting disability to be as expansive as she is'

(Image credit: Jimin Kim / SOPA Images via Reuters)

Christine Sun Kim’s best work “can change how you see the world of the disabled,” said Jerry Saltz in NYMag.com. A multimedia artist who was born deaf, the 45-year-old California native often expresses exasperation in drawings, diagrams, wall paintings, and videos. But if that makes her first museum show seem to some like a bid to exact revenge on a society that persistently disadvantages the deaf, “it is revenge at its most gripping.” In many of Kim’s works, such as a terrific video in which she and her husband take turns making sign language and augmenting the language with facial expressions, “you can hear a sardonic sort of laughter, laced with suffering.” Call it identity art if you want, but it fits the category “only in the sense that all art, in stitching the contours and distortions of experience, is identity art.”

To be clear, “Kim’s focus isn’t on disability or victimhood,” said Brian P. Kelly in The Wall Street Journal. “Rather, she’s a semiotician of the most contemporary strain, probing not just language and its limits but the nature of communication itself.” When, in her 2018 series “English vs Deaf English,” she juxtaposes how certain phrases in spoken English are translated into American Sign Language, she’s highlighting both the limits and liberties in all translation. “Not gonna repeat myself” in spoken English becomes “train gone sorry” in ASL. “No way” becomes “finish” — as do “too much” and “knock it off.” Kim’s works on paper “are the stars here,” and they become more elaborate when she begins incorporating the conventions of infographics. In her “Degrees of Deaf Rage,” she draws diagrams of various angles to convey the level of rage triggered by various affronts, from “acute rage” for minor annoyances to “full-on rage” for, as she writes beneath a blackened circle, “years of dealing with family and relatives who do not know sign language.”

Kim’s sound-related pieces can seem more formally innovative, said Emily Watlington in Art in America. With 2017’s The Grid of Prefixed Acousmatics, she “manages to cement complicated ideas from sound studies into ceramic sculptures.” Elsewhere, she translates the idea of an echo into a room-filling visual. But what’s special about “All Day All Night,” which travels to Minneapolis next year, is that it’s “the first major museum show to allow an artist confronting disability to be as expansive as she is.” Kim is interested in advocating for the Deaf community. But she also makes work that expresses her interest in music, sound, Deaf culture, and language. Again and again, said Lisa Yin Zhang in Hyperallergic, her work “reiterates how wondrous, devastating, exhausting, not enough, too much, funny, and beautiful language can be.”