Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night

by Christine Sun Kim (Artist)

316 pages, Hardcover

Published May 6, 2025

Reviews

[Ray Dunsmore]

I read this in the exhibit space at the Walker near the end of its run (on Free Thursdays - the best gift to the weeks I've spent since moving to Minneapolis and searching for work). This is an exhibit I found fairly interesting on first view but, apart from some of the more ambitious pieces like ATTENTION and the Game of Skill, was one I admittedly found rather underwhelming. The majority of the pieces seem to be created as easily sharable social media fodder - the sort of thing you'd find on self-consciously Relatable Tumblr blogs and Facebook pages ten years ago. Witty infographics describing Christine Sun Kim's experiences as a deaf person in a world catering to the hearing. This catalog (along with the episode of Art in the 21st Century playing on a loop at the exhibit's end) did quite a bit to show me exactly what Kim's work means and why it matters so much that it's become the subject of a major exhibition at such a venerated modern art museum. It's all about unmediated, direct communication in a world which requires Kim to communicate in mediated, indirect ways. Most people don't speak ASL (myself unfortunately included despite a short course I took in elementary school to prepare a few students for an ASL song and dance performed at a school recital), so she speaks through the voice of interpreters ("terps" to the deaf community) and has to deal with the interpersonal politics that inevitably brings up. People see past her and view her as a disability - caring little about which one it even is, they ask if she would like a wheelchair. Seeing past her to her race, some get irritated at having to speak to an ESL immigrant until, relieved, they learn she speaks fluent English and is actually deaf. When she communicates with the hearing world, it's through a delay - she is constantly receiving echoes of the world around her. Deaf culture as a whole is ignored by the hearing world at best and at worst, actively erased and deemed inferior (learning about Alexander Graham Bell's eugenics campaign against the deaf through Kim's work was a stunning eye opener). So yes, social media-ready infographic humor is a very direct, accessible and, above all, successful way to communicate her message to as many people as possible and avoid the erasure and active avoidance that the Deaf so easily fall into. It's a way to communicate her grievances with the limits of accessibility as it's prescribed by the able, with the limits of communication, to bring the average person into the world of Deaf culture and make them understand where she's coming from. The half-page biographical information scattered throughout the main body of plates in the book was also a fascinating way to position Kim's work in the context of her life, too. So while I left the catalog here rather disappointed that the bulk of Kim's sound art couldn't be reproduced (the low tone piece reproduced through a loudspeaker pointed at the floor that can only be experienced by seeing the distortions of the windowpane near it is absolutely fascinating), it certainly facilitated a much deeper appreciation of Kim's art and why it truly matters.