Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night

Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC

One doesn’t just encounter Christine Sun Kim’s work — you overhear it, even in silence. In All Day All Night, her first solo museum exhibition in New York, Kim reclaims sound as a battleground, a playground, and most provocatively, a site of Deaf resistance.

The show is a conceptual triumph — spare, sharp, and humming with the quiet rage of someone who’s spent a lifetime being misheard, mistranslated, or simply ignored. The Whitney, thankfully, gives her space — literal and metaphorical — to do what she does best: unravel the tyranny of “normal” communication and rewire our expectations of what language looks and feels like.

You walk in and the first thing you notice is how empty it feels. But wait. That’s not emptiness. That’s restraint — and Kim uses it like a scalpel. Her textual works, in bold charcoal or ink, whisper and shout at once. “SOUND IS HEARD THROUGH THE BODY.” “VOICES CARRY POWER, MINE CARRIES ME.” Her pieces read like protest signs that have been passed through a poet’s hands and soaked in irony.

Kim doesn’t just speak about Deaf experience — she speaks through it. Sound is never denied; it’s deconstructed, subverted, queered. In one room, we see a suite of drawings mapping the “social currency” of voices. In another, a looping video work disrupts the default hierarchy of hearing/speaking as normative tools of expression. She doesn't ask the hearing world to feel guilty — she asks it to listen differently, which is much harder.

And let’s talk about that title: All Day All Night. It’s not just a schedule; it’s a state of being. For Kim, navigating sound — or the absence of it — is a 24/7 condition. It permeates every social interaction, every assumption. This exhibition refuses to let us forget that.

Most radically, Kim reframes Deafness not as lack but as language. Her fluency in American Sign Language (ASL), captioning systems, and sonic semiotics becomes her medium. Her art is the transcription of a life lived on the margins of sound but at the centre of meaning.

If you’re the kind of person who finds comfort in clear answers and clean audio — you’ll leave this show unsettled. Good. Let that feeling sit with you.

Christine Sun Kim is not asking for access. She’s building her own stage and pulling down the curtains on the rest.

Get in. Or be drowned out.