Christine Sun Kim: Scaling and Scoring Fury

According to The Whitney's website, the artwork and experimentation present in its exhibit Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night (2025) demonstrate Kim’s dedication “to sharing her Deaf lived experiences with others”—an incredibly watered-down description; this press release fails to capture the unapologetic intensity the Orange Country-based artist imbues in her work. Kim’s art encapsulates the unfiltered rage elicited by being deaf in America, supplemented by a permeating, earnest sense of sardonic humor. Despite her deafness, Kim’s work plays with sound, translating it to imagery through visual motifs like musical notation. Her art primarily tackles her frustration with common occurrences brought about by her deafness, but those frustrations extend to larger-scale anger towards America. 

Kim’s anger is a recurring motif throughout the exhibit, most explicitly quantified in the Degrees of Deaf Rage series. She categorizes the subject matter across multiple canvases, measuring her experiences of deaf rage with corresponding angles. These vary in degree, each labeled with a different circumstance that Kim has faced as a deaf person. In Degree of Deaf Rage in Everyday Situations (2018), “People who act like we don’t exist are secretly scared of us” is 180 degrees: “straight up rage.” Degrees of Deaf Rage Concerning Interpreters (Terps) (2018) has “legit rage”; a right angle is “Terps who secretly self-congratulate for ‘helping us.’” Degrees of Deaf Rage Within Educational Settings (2018) has a 360 degree angle; “full-on rage” is labeled “The Milan Conference of 1880,” a conference where educators banned teaching sign language in school. Kim isn’t exclusively criticizing everyday biases; by attacking interpreters and the Milan Conference, which was run by deaf educators, she also elucidates how the systems intended to accommodate deaf people fail them. She simultaneously mocks intolerance, condescension, and incompetence; there’s an all-encompassing, universal, and raw relatability to this.

Kim utilizes symbols from music notation in her drawings, contorting and rearranging them from their traditional functions to shatter the conventions of music theory. A mezzo forte symbol labeled “SLEEP” is etched in blue graphite onto the bottom of How to Measure Loudness’s (2014) canvas. It crescendos upward; above it, there's a forte, labeled “SILENCE INTO SPEECH.” Then, a fortissimo. It gets louder—to a ludicrous degree; all the way at the top, there’s a fortississi-(times six)-mo, labeled “VOICE LOST IN OBLIVION.” Some labels evoke the everyday frustration of Degrees of Deaf Rage, like “ASIAN FLUSH” or “YELL AT TSA OFFICER.” One is an actual measure of high intensity sound; second to the top is “95 DECIBELS AND ABOVE.” Kim applies a similar method in How to Measure Quietness (2014)—naturally, instead of forte, she labels piano symbols with subjects like “HEARTBURN” and “ANXIETY.”  In an email interview with the National Endowment for the Arts, Kim stated that she “employs music as a vehicle for ASL,” just as “sign language interpreters are a vehicle for her voice” to illuminate “the importance of utilizing sound in order to have a voice.” In Loudness, she uses forte to evoke the explosive force of intense emotion through art—necessitated by deafness. That’s why Kim transcends traditional music notation with nonexistent dynamics; Loudness and Quietness articulate phrenetic shrieks and powerful despondency, respectively, not digestible melody. 

Kim’s aim to portray sign language through music is epitomized by The Star Spangled Banner (2020). Instead of merely conveying raw emotion, the drawing—the notation for Kim’s ASL interpretation of Demi Lovato’s 2020 Super Bowl performance of the National Anthem—is a scathing political critique of America. There’s no staff; the drawing is a jumbled mess of quarter, eighth, half, and sixteenth notes. They’re scattered, out of order, and spread across the canvas like disparate crumbs of music. The notes, labeled with words from the anthem’s lyrics, correspond to Kim’s movements in the performance. An eighth note labeled “ROCKET”  connects across the canvas to another eighth labeled “GLARE,” mirroring the growing intensity of Kim’s expressive gestures in her performance—her movement gets warbly and more expressive as Lovato sings that lyric. Specific words from the anthem—“war” on two quarter notes, “bomb” on a set of sixteenth notes, and “brick” on a quarter—are smacked in the middle of the canvas. With the canvas’s chaotic structure, it’s the age-old critique of America and its military—she’s picking easy targets. 

The Star Spangled Banner is not necessarily a coherent, ideological deconstruction; as in Degrees of Deaf Rage, it’s petty, spontaneous fury—but this time, done with direct intention. In an op-ed Kim wrote for the The New York Times, she describes Fox Sports cutting away from her performance several times, barely showing her on the broadcast. “Although thrilled and excited to be on the field serving the deaf community,” Kim wrote, she “was angry and exasperated.” She recalled that she initially “needed to process some internal conflict before accepting [the performance],” since “being deaf in America has always been political.” (Throughout the past decade, there’s been a pattern of cops brutalizing and killing innocent and unarmed deaf people, which Kim brought up as an example).  Kim supplemented her disillusionment with the American establishment with assurances that she was proud to perform at the Super Bowl and proud of America. She incongruously ended her editorial with a concession, ultimately praising the NFL’s “efforts to promote accessibility.” There’s a disparity between the drawing and the conciliatory nature of the article, suggesting that she feels more critical of America than what she expresses in her writing. The Star Spangled Banner feels like Kim’s sublimation of the pent up rage from the article’s concession. She’s highlighting America’s most blatant flaws to embrace her “anger” and “exasperation” at a country synonymous with capitalist oppression. As she stated in the National Endowment interview, in The Star Spangled Banner, visual representations of music and ASL are Kim’s true vehicle for her voice, espousing radical ideas that she avoided in her op-ed. 

Kim’s drawings and diagrams are minimalistic, but that allows her labels and symbology to create a blunt, harsh narrative. Rage permeates All Day All Night, and the straightforwardness of her work makes this viscerally noticeable. The “voice” Kim mentioned to the National Endowment—what she uses her visuals as a vehicle for—is fervent and loud; the exhibit makes this obvious.