Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Art often wanders beyond the confines of its own sensorial realm. Symphonies paint sunrises. Colours jangle and crash. Chords can be succulent or perfumed. Much prose tends towards purple. The artist Christine Sun Kim, who was born deaf, operates in this synaesthetic sphere, using visual media to explore the significance of sound. Her first major museum show at the Whitney in New York, All Day All Night, is a mixture of wry, witty, puzzling and angry works. They aren’t always subtle or alluring, but they alert us to the nuances and poetry, the joy and bitterness of living in, and also outside, the hearing world.The most satisfying pieces are the most direct. In her series of large-scale drawings “Degrees of Deaf Rage”, diagrams of geometric angles describe gradations of fury. Acute angles represent relatively trifling irritations, such as “being offered a wheelchair at the arrival gate and the Braille menu at restaurants”. When you get to “movies with no captions on plane”, the two rays swing open to 180 degrees. The full 360 — a black circle — embodies an existential level of frustration: “years of dealing with family and relatives who do not know sign language”.Kim is the child of hearing parents who emigrated to the US in the 1970s from South Korea. (She was born in 1980.) One of the show’s tenderest works is a giant pie chart illustrating “Why My Hearing Parents Sign”. There are traces of resentment in some of the smallest slices (“so they can tell me family secrets (they don’t)”, and “so we can argue effectively and frequently”). Yet that negativity is pushed aside by the fattest section, labelled “they’re cooler than your parents”.Another honest and intimate drawing in the pie chart series, “When I Play the Deaf Card”, tells us how she occasionally exploits her condition to pre-board planes, to avoid being stopped by charity workers on the street, and to jump queues at Disneyland, night clubs and the Eiffel Tower.After graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology and the School of Visual Arts in New York, she landed a job at the Whitney, leading tours and developing programmes for Deaf audiences. The museum has been crucial to her career. “Degrees of Deaf Rage” was included in its 2019 Biennial and received praise that buoyed her reputation. (By then she had completed a second master of fine arts degree and was living in Berlin with her German husband, Thomas Mader, a conceptual artist who is hearing.)Kim doesn’t work around her disability; she confronts it, measuring the chasm it creates between her and the majority. She keeps returning to the one topic you might expect her to avoid: sound. Fascinated by a physical and artistic experience that is denied to her, she harnesses the symbolic language of music for her own expressive ends. Kim repurposes basic indications of volume — p for soft, f for loud — to convey entirely different ideas. The p’s multiply in “The Sound of Being Spaced Out”, a drawing that charts the mind’s meander from thought to blankness.The Whitney show arrives just as Washington is taking a sledgehammer to identity politics and its artistic corollaries. Yet Kim’s identity is both fluid and essential to her work. She grew up as an immigrant in an increasingly nativist country and a Deaf person in a mostly hearing world. Now she is both a Korean in predominantly white Europe and an American abroad. Kim could choose to define herself by any of those overlapping subdivisions, but it’s the fact that she can’t hear that dominates her public presence. She converses directly only with other American Sign Language (ASL) speakers, a group that, as she reminds us, doesn’t include some members of her family. Every other communication must be mediated through an interpreter, writing, informal body language, or the messages encrypted in her art.Kim embraces that barrier, draws attention to it, and constantly reminds viewers of the connection between hearing and sight. In the video work “Face Opera II”, Kim and an ensemble of performers respond to cues with exaggerated facial expressions and an assortment of hoots and chirps. Much of her work analyses how people communicate — or fail to — across languages and cultures. A 2018 series of drawings, “English vs Deaf English”, makes the point that the ASL sign for “finish” (both hands, with palms open, swivel away from the face) can be tweaked for a range of different meanings: “no way!”, “I did”, “stop”, “knock it off”, “too much” and a horrified “noooo!”.Ironically, in analysing these glitches and felicities, she comes up with a symbolic language all of her own — one that requires elaborate annotations to be understood. She translates the ASL gesture for the phrase “all day” (left forearm placed horizontally and palm down, right forearm sweeping like a clock’s hand across the chest) into an arc of black paint. The sign for “all night” (similar, except that the right hand swings below the left) produces the inverse curve in red. Those enchained metamorphoses — concept into speech, speech into movement, and movement into paint — ultimately yield a picture that is less interesting than the process, and meaningless without explanation. The same is true of the mural “Too Much Future”, which renders all that is still to come as thick black curves on the gallery walls, bouncing off the floor and into a corner. The shape invokes the ASL sign for “will”, amplifying and multiplying it until it bursts into a set of turbulent waves. And yet rather than capturing the drama that Kim intended, her painted undulations wind up feeling static and heavy.Kim is an articulate and wordy artist, who evidently enjoys giving interviews and lecturing about her art (through an interpreter), even if she sometimes sheds more darkness than light. That’s sort of the point. She keeps reminding us that we all miss messages that are obvious to others. Even among people who share a language, a culture, physical endowments and a home, communicating is a rough and approximate business indeed.To July 6, whitney.orgFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
