NEW YORK, NY.- Opening at the Whitney Museum of American Art on February 8, 2025, Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night is the artist’s first major museum survey. Co-organized by the Whitney Museum and Walker Art Center, the exhibition foregrounds how Christine Sun Kim (b. 1980, Orange County, California; lives and works in Berlin, Germany) utilizes sound, language, and the complexities of communication in her wide-ranging approach to artmaking. All Day All Night brings together over 90 artworks spanning 2011 to the present across three floors of the Museum and features drawings, site-specific murals, paintings, video installations, and sculptures.
Using musical notation, infographics, and language—both in her native American Sign Language (ASL) and written English—Kim has produced a perceptive, poetic, humorous, and political body of work. In her artwork, activism, and public voice, Kim confronts the systemic marginalization of the Deaf community and subordination of access while celebrating the importance of community and family. Inspired by similarly named works made at different moments in her career, the exhibition’s title, All Day All Night, points to the energy Kim brings to her artistic practice; she is relentlessly experimental, iterative, and dedicated to sharing her lived experiences with a broad spectrum of audiences.
This mid-career survey builds on the artist and the Whitney’s sustained relationship. Between 2007 and 2014, Kim was an educator, and later, a consultant, for the Museum, where she helped to establish Whitney Signs, an ongoing program that offers tours in ASL led by Deaf educators, and ASL-led vlogs. She returned to the Whitney in 2018 to present the public art installation Too Much Future, her first large-scale mural, and in 2019, she was featured in the Whitney Biennial.
“We are thrilled to extend the Whitney’s long-standing and close relationship with Christine Sun Kim and honored to collaborate on this important milestone in her career,” said Scott Rothkopf, Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney. “Ranging in scale from intimate charcoal drawings to architecturally sized pieces, Kim’s work is full of acerbic wit and pointed commentary, while generously offering ways for audiences to understand how the artist navigates the world.”
“The exhibition invites viewers to reconsider the importance placed on sound,” said Jennie Goldstein, Jennifer Rubio Associate Curator of the Collection at the Whitney Museum. “It encourages us to consider the diversity and richness of Deaf culture and the complexities of identity more broadly, in relation to artistic collaboration, parenthood, immigration, or diasporic experience.”
“When you sign All Day All Night, you almost make a circle in the air,” Kim said. “For me, having started at the Whitney as an educator and coming back as an artist, it’s a full circle moment.”
Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night will be on view through July 2025. This exhibition is organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. The organizing curators are Jennie Goldstein, Jennifer Rubio Associate Curator of the Collection, Whitney Museum of American Art; Pavel Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts and Collections Strategy, Walker Art Center; and Tom Finkelpearl, independent curator; with Rose Pallone, Curatorial Assistant, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Brandon Eng, Curatorial Assistant, Walker Art Center. The exhibition will be on view at the Walker Art Center from March 27 through September 6, 2026.
Exhibition Overview – Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night
Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night takes its title from early drawings and more recent shaped canvases that visualize the ASL hand movement of the sun moving over the horizon and then dipping below it. Spanning three floors and echoing throughout the Museum, the exhibition traces Kim’s work across painting, sculpture, drawing, moving image, performance, large-scale murals, and collaborations with other artists, made between 2011 and 2024. The thematic presentation cuts across time and space to consider some of the artist’s core concerns with Deaf lived experience, the importance of family, friends, and community, and how we negotiate shared social spaces.
8th Floor
The exhibition unfolds over multiple distinct exhibition spaces at the Whitney. Much of the works in the show are installed on the eighth floor, where the exhibition surveys Kim’s career to date, from documentation of her early experimental performances to her most recent large-scale mural, Ghost(ed) Notes (2024). The works on this floor address her primary artistic concern: calling attention to the politics of sound and scrutinizing the social currency of oral languages. In drawings—her primary medium—and videos, Kim uses musical notation and scores, infographics, and language play in ASL and written English to make sense of her lived experiences. The interrelated topics of communication, family, trauma, the future, and monetary and societal debt are filtered through her poignant, humorous, and sharp observations. Highlights include rarely seen early drawings, such as All Day. All Night. (2012), Pianoiss…issmo (Worse Finish) (2012), and Feedback Aftermath (2012); major multi-part drawing series, including Future Base (2016) and Degrees of Deaf Rage (2018); and several significant video installations, such as Tables and Windows (2016) and Looky Looky (2018), both made in collaboration with Thomas Mader, among other works.
3rd Floor
The third floor focuses on the echo, conceptually and as a graphic reference to the ASL sign. The gallery space features a large mural, Prolonged Echo (2023), that spreads over multiple walls, effectively surrounding the viewer. The imagery—undulating passages of thick, arching black lines—derives from the shape of the sign for “echo” in ASL, where the tips of four fingers of one hand contact the open palm of the other and then bounce away. For Kim, the notion of the echo relates to her experiences navigating in the hearing world, as there is a delay in relaying information as ASL interpreters “echo” what she signs. Related drawings, Long Echo (2022) and Pointing (2022), displayed on top of the mural further layer the echo visually and experientially.
1st Floor
The free-to-visit Lobby Gallery features drawings, video, and a large sculptural installation. The works gathered in this space explore the interconnectedness of ASL and Deaf culture. Some drawings in this gallery consider the role that sign language interpreters play in making Kim “sound” different, while others, such as Whatcha Doing, Do Do (2018), compare specific written English words and phrases with their Deaf English (shorthand translations of ASL) counterparts. The large-scale kinetic sculpture made with Thomas Mader, ATTENTION (2022), consists of two fan-powered, arm-shaped appendages that enact the method of attracting attention to oneself or something else in ASL. The arms wave and point at a rock, eroding its surface as they attempt to get attention or bring attention to something repeatedly, a poignant reminder of the power of communication.
Christine Sun Kim is an American artist based in Berlin. Kim’s practice considers how sound operates in society, deconstructing the politics of sound and exploring how oral languages operate as social currency. Musical notation, written language, infographics, American Sign Language (ASL), the use of the body, and strategically deployed humor are all recurring elements in her practice. Working across drawing, performance, video, and large-scale murals, Kim explores her relationship to spoken and signed languages, to her built and social environments, and to the world at large.
Kim has exhibited and performed internationally, including at the Gwangju Biennale (2023); Secession, Vienna (2023); Queens Museum, New York (2022); Drawing Center, New York (2022); Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2021); Manchester International Festival (2021); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2020); Whitney Biennial, New York (2019); Buffalo AKG Art Museum (2019); Art Institute of Chicago (2018); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017); De Appel Arts Center, Amsterdam (2017); Berlin Biennale (2016); Shanghai Biennale (2016); MoMA PS1, New York (2015); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013), among numerous others. Kim’s awards and fellowships include an MIT Media Lab Fellowship, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Ford and Mellon Foundations’ Disabilities Future Fellowship, and the Prix International d’Art Contemporain of the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco. Her works are held in numerous prominent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate Britain, London; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.
