The Brooklyn Rail

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, 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. This conversation was recorded for the Rail’s New Social Environment (Episode #1,185) on the occasion of Kim’s exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Christina Yang (Rail): I feel very, very lucky to be woven into the web of Christine’s community and to be here with her today, and a special thanks and welcome to her two interpreters, Beth Staehle and Denise Kahler-Braaten. The Whitney Museum exhibition is felt throughout almost the entire museum, across the eighth floor, the third floor, on the first floor, and in the lower level.

So, even before a visitor enters the exhibition, there is this incredible immersion and wrapping that takes place on the museum walls, Ghost(ed) Notes (2024, re-created 2025). There’s a kind of shimmer or hesitation that is so evocative. Could you speak to this work, which in some ways is the introduction of the show. Was this an exhibition design decision?

Christine Sun Kim: Something I think about a lot is the idea of echo and how it captures deafness and the Deaf experience so well. It became an overarching theme in the process of developing the exhibition. I wanted echo and repetition to have a presence in the exhibition design. And the team here managed to achieve that with the wall designs on the eighth floor, the way there are L-shaped walls that repeat themselves.

What I love is that when you get off the elevator, you see my work first, and then you walk into the gallery and find the title wall. When it comes to my mural, I work with a painter who is British, but lives in Berlin. His name is Jake Kent. I can’t remember exactly when we started working together, but it was years ago. He wasn’t the only painter that I worked with initially, but I discovered that he knows exactly what I want. He understands my work the best, and in fact, he has enough autonomy from our relationship that he can make decisions without having to confirm those decisions with me every time. So he uses this dry-brushiness technique. Basically, it’s that you’ve run out of paint on the brush and still continue to paint, which gives my mural a sense of the charcoal that you find in my drawings. And so what’s happening when Jake is painting my murals on-site is that he’s echoing my work [laughs].

Rail: Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night refers to two drawings, to two bodies of work. The early drawings are from about 2012, the shaped canvas is more recent, from 2023. In the catalogue introduction, the curators offer that the titles—I’m going to paraphrase here a little bit—represent ASL (American Sign Language) as the connective tissue that communicates the joy of Deaf folks talking, chatting all day and all night. But I wanted to ask you what the title signifies for you?

Kim: The line drawings correspond to the signs for “all day” and “all night” in American Sign Language. The black line drawing shows all day, and the red line drawing is all night. These drawings come from my last summer at Bard when I was getting my MFA in sound. I had been going through this process, I had been working a lot with marker to identify my practice and my vocabulary. The series of drawings, “Feedback Aftermath,” which is in the exhibition, uses marker, but I don’t use it any longer. What an interesting word, “mark-er.” I also found it to be too clean in leaving my mark. I’m very complex. I’m very messy. My beingness can be hostile. My beingness can be forgetful, ambiguous, hard to capture, and for all those reasons, charcoal and dry pastel really suit my practice—marker less so. And what I realized is that there is a politics behind leaving traces of you. And if you leave a messy enough mark, you can never fully erase it, which is what I get with charcoal. That’s why I like it. There’s the politics of adding my own little Deaf and Korean American history to many histories from all over the world and from all different kinds of people.

Rail: You mentioned the “All. Day., All. Night.” series started not long after you completed your MFA at Bard. I would love to hear you talk about your disciplinary identification as a sound artist. In your catalogue interview, you speak about mentors like John Cage or Pauline Oliveros and Nam June Paik. I would love to hear you talk about your use of musical notation, and how these notes and texts and visual codes—how are they working for you, artistically and politically?

Kim: When I made the leap into sound as a medium, that was probably one of the scariest moments of my entire life. I couldn’t help but wonder, what the fuck am I doing? I know nothing about sound. But the truth is that I did know a lot, just not in the universal way. I feel like a lot of times people talk about sound regardless of whether they hear or don’t hear, because it’s been such a hearing thing, and so we talk about it as if it’s a hearing thing.

I feel colonized by sound, and so I had to decolonize myself from sound, from the way hearing people see sound. And so, as I was going through this journey, it made sense to engage with John Cage’s work. For me, John Cage basically broke every single classical rule or tradition around music, and didn’t feel bad about it, right? He was like: “Look, you can notate whatever you want.” He was somebody who was saying you could notate silence; you could notate chairs. Engaging with his practice helped me better understand what was possible, realizing that I could go in my own direction. I could also do what I want. I didn’t realize that for most of my life until that point.

Of course, John Cage wrote about other topics that I don’t find as relatable, which is the same thing with Pauline Oliveros. Some of that is really hard for me to relate to, but obviously these are fantastic people to have been inspired by. Pauline was one of my teachers at Bard, and I felt really fortunate because she did spend a lot of time with me. I felt like my relationship with her was much different than with other teachers.

When she was teaching her classes, she invited me in, and that was similar to the experience that I had with another teacher, Larry Polansky, who just passed away last year, but Larry actually knew sign language. That was so special for me to be able to have an instructor who I could communicate to in sign language without an interpreter. To me, Pauline and Larry were two people who really spent a lot of time, who sat down with me, who also tried to understand where I was coming from in the discussions we had around sound; their actions and their dedication of their time to me had that warm welcome that I needed into the sound world.

I mean, if you’ve seen my “Degrees of Deaf Rage” drawing series, you can tell I did not have the best experience at Bard. Quite frankly, most of the students in my program were rather ableist and that forced me to ask certain questions. Like, why does sound have to be something where not everybody is welcome? When it comes to notating, that was a process for me that became politicized. Part of it was that I was just struggling to find my footing, to find out where I belonged in my sound program, in the world of sound in general, and then also the art world. Finding notation was my way of figuring out my path forward.

Rail: I would love to learn more about the block letters and handwriting in your practice. In your work, TBD TBC TBA (2015), we see at least three visual motifs at work. Your use of musical notation, the blurring and the smudging, and the implementation of text. In another work from the “Voice Series,” Too Possessive for Score (2015), rather than a straight sentence, you have a strike-through. It’s almost like you’re being our conscience through language. How do you wish to engage the viewer in these multiple levels of consciousness and reading?

Kim: I have to admit, I never felt I’ve had the privilege to be ambivalent, to be ambiguous, to be able to kind of be removed. I can’t be vague. If I’m even a little bit vague, people will just dismiss my work as hard to understand or too specific to a certain experience. So for those reasons, I can’t meet my audience halfway. I have to go beyond halfway. And I also feel like I have to be as clear as possible. I would love to get to a point where I could just say whatever I want. I want to get to that privileged platform where I can just be.

I come from the experience of always working with interpreters growing up. If I was not clear to the interpreters, and they couldn’t understand me, then nobody understood me, and then that had negative impacts on how the communication proceeded. So part of it is that I have to be clear because it’s connected to my basic rights. So I’m coming from that place of fear, and that’s from how I grew up, worrying about communicating with people who don’t sign. How do I make myself clear enough for them? I don’t worry about it all the time, but it comes to mind when I’m working through pieces. I could be in the process of creating, or sometimes I ask myself afterwards: is this piece clear enough? That is why you see text as much as you do. I feel like it is a good compromise to meet my audiences halfway. Actually, TBD TBC TBA is one of my favorite drawings, because sound is full of anticipation, expectation. That’s what I experienced with my interpreters too. As soon as my interpreter sat in front of me in class growing up, then I had access to what the teacher was saying.

Rail: The incredible catalogue essay by Seth Kim-Cohen talks about the concept of latency, and specifically about your “Future Base” series and the “Debt” series. Considering a work like Too Much Future (2017), can you talk about your experience in thinking about debt, and about time as a social obligation, particularly for the Deaf community? You’ve spoken about the sense of delay with your interpreters, and being stuck somewhere between known and unknown. Seth extracts that idea into thinking about the “Future” series and debt in particular—how certain forms of debt are about delayed pay back.

Kim: To me, future is setting oneself up to expect to receive something—like information—but that thing might not come. And so you spend time waiting and when it arrives, it feels different compared to those who received it in real time. And that connects to debt. For example, I am owed the information, but I might get less of it, and if I get less, then I’m in information debt. In a sense, this also is a commentary on access to resources, which is a conversation I’ve been having a lot with my friends recently.

I have friends who are children of deaf adults, meaning that they were born hearing into a deaf household. We call them CODAs, and I’ve finally started to see, through talking to them, that the generation of deaf people before me—who are people that might have gone to art school at Parsons, at Pratt, at SAIC, but they did the schooling without interpreters—they had to survive art school through lip reading. What does that mean for their future? Does that mean they’re only getting ten percent of the future that they should have gotten?

Now, a lot of us in my generation have been able to pursue higher education. We’re getting Ph.D.s in physics and different sciences. There are deaf doctors and deaf lawyers now. So it feels like the future we are owed is catching up to us. For a while, there was less debt around the future that we were owed. But with the way the political climate is now, it feels like our access to accommodations and resources is being taken away again. And I wonder, with the state of education being what it is, will we be smart enough to navigate the world that other people don’t have to navigate in the way that we do?

The sign in American Sign Language for “debt” and “owe” are very similar to what you would use with body language to communicate, like: pay up. Or, you owe me. We’ve seen this in films. Like, I am waiting for that money to be put in my palm, but then you modify the sign with your facial expressions. So how severe is the debt? How much does this person owe you, or how long has this person owed you? Or is it, in fact, affordable with a positive facial expression?

The drawings, America’s Debt to Deaf People and How Do You Hold Your Debt (both 2022), came to be because of the experiences that I was having as an American who moved to Berlin, and how affordable Berlin was for me. There’s a meme online that asks, how do you hold your cigarette? And how you hold your cigarette determines what kind of philosopher you are, whether you’re like René Descartes or Plato or whoever. And so I took this idea of debt—in American Sign Language the way you move your palm indicates who is in debt to who—and I moved around the hand shapes to indicate different types of debt. But this debt also, to me, means that you don’t get the full future that you’re owed. This is my list for what America owes us deaf people, which would be guaranteed fast Wi-Fi on planes, so that I can video chat with anyone I want whenever I want. That would be my number one debt that I want paid back.

Rail: You mentioned in response to Jennie Goldstein’s question from the catalogue that you’re not a fan of code-switching, although it has been a lifelong tool. You describe code-switching yourself without compromising your identity. I wonder if you could speak a little bit about those multiple identities that you hold?

Kim: So there’s one idea I’m engaging with when I work. I always need to choose a medium, and from there I can apply my work in response to that medium. Typically, what I find is that one piece or one work is not enough. I’m sure you’ve noticed most of my work comes in sets or series. “Degrees of Deaf Rage” is a set of six drawings. “Future Base” is twenty drawings. This means I have twenty answers to the question of future, and part of that is because I don’t come from one place, one identity. I have many multiple identities. So, I have to answer from multiple identities. I want to give all of those identities a chance to answer.

With the series “English vs Deaf English” from 2018, I think I have a set of four drawings. So, four drawings is one set in the series. I feel like I must over-explain, and I have to keep explaining, which comes from the experience of having so many identities in my being. Also, the experience of being an immigrant is different for me, because I’m now an immigrant in Germany. I’m navigating what’s happening over there, and what I’m seeing is that right-wing extremism is coming to the forefront, and they’re anti-immigrant. But then I look back on where I come from; my parents are immigrants in the US. I was raised by immigrants. My kids are not currently immigrants, but if they move to the US where I grew up, they will be immigrants. These are things that I think about, and I can never just answer it in one way, in one form.

Rail: Thinking about the different “Degrees of Deaf Rage” works, I’m wondering if you could talk about your engagement with institutions? Whether it’s museums, healthcare, art schools, the “Degrees of Deaf Rage” series seems directed towards your interface with bureaucratic systems. I’m fascinated by the narrative, with the text, but also how you present different scales. Can you talk about how this body of a work relates to the pie chart series? Your use of mathematical formulas as a way to quantify rage is both incredibly analytical and emotional.

Kim: I do use infographics a lot in my practice, and part of that is because of what I see on social media. I also studied graphic design while I was an undergrad, and all of those experiences have helped me understand the power of composition. It also helped me understand how just a few words can really transmit an entire idea. I love text in art, especially Ed Ruscha.

Ruscha is really talented at being able to have text without computers. He makes this kind of text with his hands, and that’s very interesting to me, and very visually impressive. I can see that he knows how to deconstruct just one letter. So one of my favorite pieces of his is If (1991), italicized, right? How he uses scale and color is very exciting to me. And coming from a graphic design perspective, I can then ask, how do I express my ideas? How do I express my deafness? And doing it in a way that I can contain it all in infographics? Infographics are just lines and shapes, that’s all they are. But within that is a universal language. Like you mentioned, pie charts—it’s an easy way to indicate how to portion out anything. People understand a big slice of something versus a small slice.

When it comes to the “Degrees of Deaf Rage” series, I chose angles because I felt the angles and the degrees could be a good way to convey a sense of quantity. Each angle has its own, like, proper noun. And then I could play with those terms. So it’s like the idea of “acute,” that is a word I can play with. Or right angle—I could play with the idea of right turning into legit, being validated in these feelings that I had was also fun for that series. And so the six pieces of rage that I have, five come from my general experiences, the Deaf community’s general experiences, friends and family’s contributions to sharing their life stories. But the last one, the sixth one, is explicitly my deaf rage in the art world. So I am thinking about specific people in that drawing, specific places and specific times. And yes, they still have my rage. I still have rage. Artists have rage.

Rail: We feel it. What can you tell us about a work like Over and Over (2016)?

Kim: This piece is about obsessing, because I obsess about a lot of things—some things I obsess over for a long period of time, some things I just obsess over really quickly. So, to make the sign for obsession, first, I’m going to point to my mind, which is why you see “RH,” right hand; “LH,” left hand. So the sign for obsession is taking what is on your mind and transferring it to your hands. So whatever is in your mind is on your hands. So you have mind-touch, and then the touch percolates, becomes cyclical, is the obsession, because what you’re doing, what you’re thinking about becomes this thing. It becomes tangible. It becomes physical, as obsessions do. So it depends on how long you obsess on something. The longer you obsess, I suppose the more physical it becomes. But this is a sign for obsession, mind, touch, mind, touch, mind, touch. And that’s what you see in the drawing here.

You can also see the perforated lines at the bottom. It’s because in those moments, the dot dot dot, if you will, is that they haven’t quite made the connection. So, where you see the solid lines, that’s where the touch has been made, and the dotted lines are where that connection hasn’t quite been made.

Rail: I’m interested in the haptics of seeing, and how seeing is a form of touch. You’ve encapsulated that so beautifully here. You mentioned earlier your interest in this notion of echo, and the “Echo Traps” series is very much all encompassing. And on view here on the third floor, and you can see a wall work and a work on paper layered on top of each other, so in a way they’re echoing each other. Could you speak a little bit more about this series, and what entices you about the echo?

Kim: So, I’m going to start off by showing you the sign for echo. You have my left hand representing the wall or the surface for the sign, and then you have my right hand being the hand that moves to represent sound. So the sign shows sound moving through air, hitting a surface and bouncing off, which is what an echo is. So that’s the sign in American Sign Language for echo, and Deaf life is full of echoes. Beth is echoing what I’m saying right now. Denise is echoing what you’re saying, and all this builds up to the deaf experience. When I was in school, all of my lectures were echoed through an interpreter or a note taker. I watched film and TV being echoed through subtitles and captions. Echoes can also be different. They can be quite thin, which means I barely got the information, or really thick, which means I got maybe ninety percent of the information, and there was almost equivalency there.

So I became obsessed with echoes. I asked myself, what if I shifted the perspective on the sign for echo? That is what you see in the drawing of Long Echo (2022). You see the movement of the echo, and then the mural, Prolonged Echo (2023, re-created 2025), speaks to the experience of an echo trap. I’ve got you stuck in this gallery with the echo repeating from wall to wall to wall, which is a commentary on when an idea or a concept gets stuck in society. It’s this idea that persists, that never changes, and this could be because it’s forever trapped. So that’s a commentary on society and the Deaf community, because we’re all guilty of this.

Rail: You had a work on the High Line as well, Christine Sun Kim: Too Much Future. Can you talk about scaling up your drawings to billboard proportions? How did that come about?

Kim: I got to this point because of Jennie Goldstein, the curator at the Whitney. When Jennie proposed the concept of doing a billboard, I thought, well, my works have only ever been on paper. I had never scaled up to the size of something like a billboard, but I chose this drawing, Too Much Future, because I just had my first baby, and this was kind of where my bandwidth landed. I gave it to Jennie, and she scaled it up to the size of a billboard, and it worked. I realized at that point what would be possible for me moving forward, and I got a lot of requests to do billboards. I worked with For Freedoms to do billboards throughout the US. Afterwards, I was invited to do murals, because people had seen billboards, and that’s when I started working with Jake Kent. I’ve never looked back since. So, thanks Jennie!

Rail: You worked with a musician and an animator for the work in the stairwell, A String of Echo Traps (2022). Can you talk about how collaboration works for you? Especially with regard to this piece?

Kim. It’s like I work in threes, because I’m commenting on a family level, society level, and community level. I have a duo practice with my husband, Tom Mader. He started working with the animator Jan Joost Verhoef who I then got introduced to. So basically, this animator became the family animator, and we all started working together.

At the Whitney, we adapted a piece called A String of Echo Traps into three cubes that are hung by wires through the stairwell. It goes from the lower level to the third floor. The original composition of this piece was two screens cornering each other, with two projectors projecting onto the screens. Once the piece was completed, I reached out to a friend who is a musician, Matt Karmil, to create a soundscape that would adapt to the work. It was important for me to have the concept be in place with the animator, and then sound to be thought of as an afterthought. So, based on the piece, I created some parameters. I gave the parameters, or instructions, to the musician to then make sound in response to the piece. So, like I said, this piece is originally made for two screens with projections on them. Jennie asked me to essentially invert this idea and cube it. I realized the shape of the cube makes better traps, the string of echo traps. And so this was entirely Jennie’s idea. She adapted it from the original iteration into cubes, and it worked. It came out really beautifully. So, thanks again, Jennie!

Rail: You mentioned your husband, Thomas Mader, who is one of your collaborators. Can you talk a little more about how that collaboration works?

Kim: When Tom and I met, he was living in Berlin and I was living in New York. At first we did a small project, which I didn’t take very seriously. We would do one piece a year together, depending on my mood. But as time passed, people began looking at our work as my work, because they were in my solo exhibitions. Then we were in a group show where we showed our work, and the labeling of our piece was “by Christine Sun Kim” and then in parentheses “and Thomas Mader.” That was the moment it became clear to me that I wanted to separate my solo practice from our dual practice. Tom is also an artist. He has his own solo practice. And I wanted to make sure that we could clarify our dual practice from my solo practice—we actually might even have a trio practice, if you consider some of the pieces that Tom and I have done with our daughter, Roux. To be fair, Roux has told us that she wants to be a zookeeper. She doesn’t want to be an artist, so I wouldn’t expect this trio practice to emerge.

Rail: Speaking of Roux, would you tell us about One Week of Lullabies for Roux (2018)?

Kim: This came to be because we were preparing for our baby to be born, and we’d gotten a wireless baby monitor. Because it’s wireless, if you, as a parent, went out of range, the baby monitor would light red, which is what you see at one end of this piece. And then when you brought the monitor back into range, it would turn purple. And that’s how, as a parent, you knew that the baby monitor was back in range.

So I decided to basically make a pill-box for this piece, a week’s worth, and use the coloring of red to purple, indicating in range and out of range, or taking the inspiration from that at least. Now, the baby monitor that I had also had pre-filled lullabies, so that if I was notified on the baby monitor that my baby was crying, I could then just push a button and a lullaby would play in her room and supposedly soothe her back to sleep. But I wasn’t comfortable with that idea. I also wasn’t interested in the lullabies that were already on the monitor. So, what I decided to do is enlist seven contributors for this piece who were also parents. I had a list of parameters for the soundtracks that I wanted them to create: no words, low frequency. You can read the audio descriptions that I asked each contributor to write about the piece they created. All these are available online. If you listen to these tracks, you can tell that they are not, in fact, lullabies for actual babies. What’s interesting is to see how the contributors’ processes were around creating these lullabies. Some of these parents had more time and could dedicate more of themselves to creating the lullabies, whereas other parents had to do this last minute rush job to get the lullaby done, which becomes a commentary on how parents function in society and how much time we may or may not have.

Rail: A final question, can you speak about how you developed the humor in your work?

Kim: Yeah, I was not funny as a kid, and it wasn’t until I left my Deaf bubble, my Deaf community, and hung out with people from the quote unquote outside world—the hearing world. Because what I was seeing was that humor was the most efficient, effective way to get what I needed. If I was serious and making demands for my needs, people weren’t really receiving it. Using humor allowed people to kind of relax and become more willing to help me, because I wasn’t taking things so seriously.

So then humor started to become part of my practice, part of my art, even part of my identity. When I spoke about this in front of an audience at the Whitney, I felt a bit like a stand up comedian. I almost felt like, “Ooh, I gotta take it easy on using all this humor.” In fact, I’m getting some facial responses from Jennie here in the room—maybe I’m over using humor right now? It might be time for me to pull the e-brake, do a u-turn, and go in the opposite direction! I don’t know, we’ll see. For me humor has always been a good tool for sharing serious things, such as my anger, my sadness. It allows audiences to feel like they can stay in the room with me, and not be scared off.