Before meeting the artist Christine Sun Kim at the Whitney Museum to talk about His new survey shows “all day all night” His team sent me a copy of his “access rider” of two pages. It contained a list of terms to avoid: not the pathology referring to it as a “deaf artist”, and please do not call it “inspiring.” He also offered resources on the distinction between Small-D deaf (the audiological condition of not listening) and Big-d dede (the community that has emerged around the language of American sign language, or ASL).
The access document was born in need. “A great curator of a big museum was to see my work for the first time, and I had to spend 45 minutes of the visit to the study of an hour educating this curator about the deaf culture, leaving only 15 minutes to talk about my work “She told me through her sign language interpreter Beth Staehle.” When this curator left, he was so angry. “At the same time, the document reflects its pragmatism and commitment to defense, even in the museum of the museum itself Whitney, where he worked from 2007 to 2014, establishing deaf programs and resources.
Much has happened since his early days in The Whitney: two teachers, A viral Ted Talk, a move to Berlin, a marriage and two children, signing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in the Super Bowl 2020 and a prosperous artistic career. Now he is back in the museum, showing paintings, drawings, murals, videos, sculptures, sound pieces and even three floors in the building.
The title of the show was chosen by its curators, Jennie Goldstein of the Whitney Museum, Pavel Pyś of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (where the show will travel) and Tom Finkelpearl, former commissioner of cultural affairs for the city of New York. Kim said the title is suitable. “I am quite obsessive with many things,” he said. “I am obsessed with how I navigate the world. I am obsessed with how to get what I need. These are things that are in my mind, being obsessed with them all day, all night. “
Kim’s work, the curators said in a recent interview, is often the first encounter that museum attendees have with the question of what it is like to live in an auditory world like a deaf person, with all anger, frustration and, The most surprising when it comes to Kim’s work, the humor it implies.
That is especially true for her best known series, “Deaf Rage” (2018), which according to her was a way of dealing with racism and isolation she experiences in her meetings with the world of hearing. Carbon drawings take the form of hand -drawn graphics and diagrams: use different angles (acute, obtuse, reflexes) to graph how much the world of art, interpreters, trips and other situations anger it. Some of them are presented as relatively minor inconveniences, even hilarious (“which is offered a wheelchair at the arrival door … and the Braille menu in restaurants”), while others inspire their complete anger (“museums With zero programming of deaf “).
“Deaf Rage” was shown at the 2019 Whitney Biennial until Kim, along with seven other participants, withdrew his work. The group protested against Warren Kanders, a member of the Museum Board, whose company supplied tear gas that was being used against migrants on the Mexican border during the first Trump administration. “To discover that Whitney had a connection to sell tear gas, I couldn’t help thinking, what if that were my son?” Kanders resigned from protests.
One of Kim’s obsessions is sound. After obtaining a MFA in visual arts at the School of Visual Arts, he completed another in sound and music in Bard College in 2013. What may seem a contradictory theme for a deaf artist is anything except, said Finkelpearl. “Part of your work is the visualization of sound. How do you see? How do you feel? And the other is the sound policy: how are people excluding depending on sound and language?
Kim said he knows “how the sound works and what are the expectations around him.” “So why would I not use that in my work instead of rejecting it directly?” She added. “Sound is not part of my life, but when I found solid art, it became really interesting for me as a means.”
Musical annotations often appear in their work, sometimes in the form of drawings. In Whitney’s exhibition, they appear in a mural that winds around the walls of the eighth floor galleries where most of Kim’s work is installed. “I have to take the voices of my interpreters to communicate my ideas, to transmit my point of view,” he said. “If I am explaining or documenting a deaf experience, listening to people will not understand it. But if I borrow music, something that people understand, then I can open it to it. ”
She uses infographics and the “lines of action” found in comics illustrations, brands that show the strength of a blow or tremor of fear or noise at full volume, say, to the same purposes. Until very recently, Kim had avoided using hands in his work, worrying that he was too cliché. Instead, it transposes the movements that are dedicated to MAKE SIGNS OF ASL in apparently abstract forms. In his mural for him Queens Museum In 2022, he thought of signs that involved contact with the body and chose four of them to create a poem: “Time must rest.” Explosions similar to the cloud and trembling lines give an idea of sign language physical.
Another of Kim’s obsessions is echo. The sign of ASL for the word, which involves the fingers of one hand bouncing from the palm of the other, appears in many of its murals and drawings.
“The deaf experience is full of echoes because we never have full and direct access to the source,” Kim said. “We receive information that echoes through subtitles, through subtitles, through interpreters, through writing.”
His interpreters know her so well, Kim said, they are more as collaborators. Sometimes they tell them that they tell a certain story that has told many times before, or asks them to order a prayer that has not expressed with enough clarity.
“Some are more suitable for my therapy sessions, others are more suitable for social situations,” Kim said. “If I want an interpreter who makes my joke sound more fun than it is, I will choose an interpreter that can make my joke sound more fun than it is.”
The collaboration is crucial not only in how Kim communicates with the world of hearing, but also with the way he makes art. Their murals also translate, in a certain sense: they are based on their drawings on a smaller scale and are transferred to the wall by British artist Jake Kent, who lives in Berlin. Kent has developed techniques to replicate the spots and other signs of his hand, not so different from the way his interpreters must transmit their words, as well as their intonation and other communication nuances.
She also has a continuous artistic association with her husband, the German artist Thomas Mader. Mader is listening; The couple has done a series of video works that deal with the most intimate questions of communication between languages and cultures, and division between deaf and auditory worlds.
At first, its relationship was largely developed through writing. When Kim emigrated to Berlin, he said: “I could not overcome how we had these really deep and intimate conversations by email, and then I see it in person, and you can barely sign. It is not that I did not try, but people do not use ASL in Germany use German sign language. “
His video “Tables and Windows” of 2016 emerged from cultural divisions they faced. ASL depends on both the facial expressions and in the movements of the hand, and at first, Kim said, he had to get used to the fact that “his facial expressions were so German, as if he barely moved.” We were having language breakdown for that. ”
In “Tables and windows”, you see them intertwined, Kim on the front and craziest on the back with the arms tied through them, or vice versa, demonstrating the signs of a series of unlikely phrases, such as the “table Round pedestal of fall sheet that is located on the street “or” a small window inside a massive door so that the goalkeeper looks towards the street “. Who is on the back makes the hands and who is in front makes the face and shoulders. “His face has really softened since then,” he said.
These issues of intimacy and communication have only become more urgent with the arrival of their two daughters: Roux, in 2017, and Dal, in 2023, who are listening. “How much of my deaf identity do I give you? I’m still discovering how they are deaf enough to connect with me, ”said Kim. “It’s hard because I am a deaf mother, living in Germany, raising two children who are going to have lives that are not like mine at all. So I really fight that. “
She has explored these questions in drawings like “Suggested quantity of spoken language with a baby whose parents communicate in sign language” (2018). The p (standing for the piano, the musical notation that means gently, the more P, softer) and the half -fourth notes and the notes of the fourth draw a daily “sound diet that guarantees that her daughter is not limited to the auditory world. In another job, a sound piece called “One week of cradle songs for Roux” (2018), Kim asked his friends to create music for his son and the corresponding audio descriptions for herself.
Then there is the question of Kim’s relationship with his American Korean heritage. She grew up in Orange County, California, the daughter of immigrant parents. His older sister is also deaf. His parents learned to sign, he said, “but there was not always a clear communication.”
“My white ear teachers would tell my mother not to teach me Korean because they thought I would confuse me,” he said. “So my parents could not always convey their language and culture to me.”
In the last five years, Kim has been trying to connect more closely with that Korean culture through what she calls her “physical” aspects: food, holiday celebration and other traditions. She has also become an active member of GyopoA collective of artists and professionals from the Korean artisans with headquarters in Los Angeles.
“It was important that Christine thinks who has access to our events and conversations, if it is because you are deaf and there are no ASL, or for socio -economic or geographical reasons,” said Christine Y. Kim, one of the founders of the group and a curator In general in Tate.
For the artist Carolyn Lazard, who, as Kim, was appointed inaugural Futurs Futures in 2019 by the Ford and Mellon bases, is precisely this expansive thinking that makes Kim’s work so exciting. “The notation, the concept of musicality, the pictorial, the sononic in a way that feels like the world that expands,” said Lazard. “And she is doing it together with being an incredible defender of deaf culture and having to do an incredible amount of work so that her art is intelligible as art.”
All day all night
Until July 6, Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, Manhattan; 212-570-3600, Whitney.org.
