Opening-Day Talk: Christine Sun Kim in Conversation with Christine Y. Kim

Why It Matters

Kim’s reinterpretation of sound through visual and linguistic systems expands the definition of music, amplifying deaf perspectives in mainstream art institutions and prompting critical reassessment of how time and capitalism shape cultural production.

Key Takeaways

• Kim redefines sound using visual notation and deaf experience.
• Exhibition spans 2011‑2026, showcasing performance, murals, and scores.
• Pandemic inspired works translating daily rhythms into graphic sound scores.
• Collaboration with interpreters treats Kim as living musical score.
• Themes of time, futurity, and capitalism permeate her installations.

Summary

The Walker Art Center and the Whitney Museum opened "Christine Sun Kim All Day, All Night," a retrospective covering the artist’s output from 2011 to 2026. Curators and supporters introduced the show, acknowledging Indigenous lands and the network of foundations that made the exhibition possible. The talk featured both Christine Sun Kim and critic Christine Y. Kim, who framed the exhibition as a meditation on deaf sonic experience and the politics of time. Kim explained that her practice begins with a deaf interrogation of sound: she started with low‑frequency tones, then turned musical notation into a visual language that she could hand to interpreters, effectively making herself the score. Works like the "sound of gravity" and the "sound of constipation" illustrate how she maps bodily and environmental phenomena onto traditional musical symbols, turning everyday rhythms into graphic scores. The pandemic prompted a series of pieces that charted phone‑checking loops and lockdown routines, while her Super Bowl‑era translation of the national anthem demonstrated how large‑scale performance can be re‑imagined through ASL. Memorable moments include Kim’s description of using multiple "piano" symbols to denote varying degrees of quiet, her mural that treats temperature as a sonic parameter, and the collaborative moment when Hank Willis Thomas introduced the two Christine Kims on stage. The dialogue also touched on the exhibition’s recurring motifs of time—future, past, debt—and how these intersect with contemporary capitalism, a theme highlighted in the catalog essay by Seth Kim‑Cohen. The conversation underscores a broader shift: deaf artists are redefining auditory media as visual and conceptual, challenging entrenched music‑industry hierarchies and expanding museum audiences. By foregrounding notation, translation, and temporal critique, Kim’s work invites institutions and viewers to reconsider how sound, silence, and community intersect in a post‑pandemic cultural landscape.

Original Description

Join curator Christine Y. Kim for a conversation with artist Christine Sun Kim as they discuss the newly opened exhibition Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night. For this opening-day talk, they will take cues from works in the exhibition to explore topics such as collaborating across disciplines, challenging conventions of language and communication, and the social and political dimensions of sound.

Click here to access descriptions of the images on screen:

https://walkerart.org/calendar/2026/christine-sun-kim-in-conversation-with-christine-y-kim