The Sight of Silence: Christine Sun Kim’s “All Day, All Night”

Banner Image: Christine Sun Kim, All Day All Night. Photo: Eric Mueller. Courtesy Walker Art Center.

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The first glance at Kim’s exhibition is a vision of black and white graphs, mysteriously hard to read, as if they were esoteric symbols or pictures from a mathematical textbook. Stark charcoal lines based on music notes trace their way across the floor, along the walls, and are framed as large drawings. Experiments with the shape of music notes graph the sounds of daily experiences, and drawings using the symbol for pianissimo chart silence upon silence upon silence.

As an artist who focuses primarily on the deaf experience, these pieces by Kim are a logical exploration of her relationship to sound. The exhibition, which contains work from all stages of her career, helps viewers understand the experience of deaf people, and examines the connections and limits of both language and ASL, often with a humorous bent. 

Beyond this instructive aspect, Kim’s work opens up for contemplation the liminal space of silence itself and examines noise as an outside observer. In the modern world, which is so frequently inundated with every kind of noise, this becomes a very interesting space for viewers. Although it is made clear from the exhibit that life as a deaf person can be oftentimes a struggle, the clarity of silence summoned by the exhibit gives a new perspective on the event of noise itself, and asks if noise can be represented in a visual form.

Kim’s drawings also map the movement of gesture. Many of her pieces have lines whose shapes trace the path of a hand signing specific words in ASL. Some of these pieces, such as the titular “All  Day All Night” become new hieroglyphics which draw connections also to the world of performing arts, and to the study of human movement. These pieces ask important questions about human communication and linguistics.

 

Image: How to Measure Quietness, 2014. Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art.

 

Throughout the exhibit, drawings and videos show the difference between how phrases are spoken in English and how they would be expressed in American sign language. One thinks to ask whether it is easier to express a thought or feeling in spoken word or signage, and the difficulties of translation between the two cast light on that common human problem of communication, which is always imperfect, no matter what language.  

Further into the exhibition, many of Kim’s more recent drawings focus less on sound and experience and more on the politics of accessibility.  These pieces have a strong flavor of ressentiment - hostility brooding over a feeling of inferiority, or a lack of accommodation. Daily inconveniences are turned into pieces which hold grudges. Examples of these pieces include a series of ‘Degrees of Deaf Rage’ in which Kim draws her frustration when people aren’t sufficiently helpful to her as a deaf person in educational settings, museums, and airports. Another drawing is written “America’s Debt to Deaf People.” It remains to be said that while no institution is perfect, many of them, including the Walker, have been investing more and more into accessibility.

 

Image: Degrees of My Deaf Rage in the Art World, 2018, Charcoal and oil pastel on paper, 49.5 x 49.5 in.
126 x 126 cm. Courtesy of François Ghebaly.

 

In these later pieces any innovations Kim may have made earlier in her career wane in favor of contentious yet quotidian issues. The artistic merit of her earlier works consisted of their ability to explore both subjective experience and abstract concepts at once; the later pieces are closer to political infographics. But of course these themes are nothing new in the contemporary art world.

This relates to another trend in contemporary art, which is multimedia pursuits and gallery installations. The largest installation in Kim‘s exhibit is called “Attention” and it features two large red inflatable arms that either point at or make the sign for attention to a large rock.

The arms are mechanically deflated and re-inflated over and over. In the blurb next to the piece the rock is said to be eroded by the fingers’ touch and “inertly receives these ongoing communications.” Kim describes the process as “trying to get one’s attention or bring attention to something forever.” I can’t find many phrases to exemplify the contemporary art institution better than this, the world which constantly tries to draw our attention with shocking performance pieces, absurd installations, and outrage at the state of the world in tastefully curated fonts. The many voices are pointing loudly at something, yet the pieces themselves often appear quiet or uninteresting, like a rock. 

 

Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader, ATTENTION, 2022. Installation view, Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night. Courtesy Walker Art Center, photo: Eric Mueller.

Another installation, this time using video, focuses on the voice by repeating clips of movies, such as Ariel losing her voice in Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Although the piece also draws attention to subtitling, this clip on its own seems especially pertinent. The focus on sound and voice makes one wonder whether Kim feels like a vital part of her power has been lost and whether she is trying to reclaim it in a visual way. This seems to be true especially of the later pieces, which are very text-heavy. However, in the deluge of voices in the information age, with the need to “find one’s voice” or to “empower the voices” of such-and-such group, the power of silence is often overlooked.

The ability of an art piece to stir the soul through the purely visual aspect, to be able to speak without words (or even without a didactic panel!) emerges quietly but undisturbed as the true measure of a piece’s value. For this reason the pieces of Kim’s that explore silence, and the levels of silence, are those that are the most compelling. The best pieces in art, from ancient altarpieces to modern sculpture, inspire the stillness and silence of contemplation: evoking a power stronger than noise.◼︎ 

Christine Sun Kim’s “All Day, All Night” closed on August 30th. To learn more about the show from the artist, check out this interview Humor Humanizes: Christine Sun Kim in Dialogue in the Walker Reader. You can visit Christine Sun Kim’s website at christinesunkim.com.