Christine Sun Kim Conveys the Intricacy of American Sign Language

As someone who only speaks English, encountering the intricacies of American Sign Language (ASL) is like discovering quantum mechanics. Many works in ‘All Day All Night’, Christine Sun Kim’s mid-career survey at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, feature the artist’s native ASL, either manually signed with the body or graphically rendered in a notation of her invention (often accompanied by English captions). Manual ASL offers more ways of communicating than spoken languages composed of phonetic utterances and tonal expressions. For example, in manual ASL, facial expressions – which are paired with hand and body movements – not only signify affect but also convey phenomena ranging from grammar to surface texture.

In the two-channel video installation Tables and Windows (2016), Kim (who is Deaf) stands in front of her partner, the German artist Thomas Mader (who is hearing), demonstrating manual ASL. Kim, whose arms are behind her back, signifies with her facial expressions, while Mader signifies with his arms, which are looped through Kim’s elbows. Each channel sees a partner physically constrained (tied arms, covered face); they must work together to communicate, recalling the ways in which hearing and non-hearing people collaborate through the use of an ASL interpreter. For ‘WARPED KNOCK OFF DESIGNER TABLE’, Mader uses his arms to sign pictographically in three dimensions, delineating the shape of a table and the curves of its legs.

In the drawing All. Day. (2012), an arching line renders the shape of the sign for ‘all day’ in two dimensions, indicating the movement of the dominant arm along the arc of a semicircle as if tracing a sun rising and setting. Orthographic ASL, wherein handshapes and signs are illustrated, is both writing and drawing. These inscriptions also record time through line. To sign the word ‘future’, one sets the hand next to one’s temple and flicks the palm twice. When written, the symbol looks like a pinched line, which indicates the pause between the two flicks of the wrist. The series ‘Future Base’ (2016) comprises 20 variations on that symbol in charcoal, illustrating different concepts about the future. One drawing looks like a curved line dropping straight into an open door turned sideways. The accompanying English text reads: ‘FUTURE TELLS BAD KNOCK-KNOCK JOKES.’

In a catalogue essay, art historian Seth Kim-Cohen writes, ‘Kim’s work is always at work in and on the latency between signifier and signified; the latter never present at the moment of the former.’ The sign for ‘echo’ forms the basis for ‘Pointing’ (2022), a series of drawings adapted from the ASL symbol for ‘echo’ turned sideways. In one drawing, the symbol is enlarged beyond the edges of the canvas, past legibility. It recalls Franz Kline’s Untitled (1952), one of a series of abstract-expressionist paintings resembling Japanese calligraphy. As the critic Paul Brach wrote – quoted in the work’s wall text at the Metropolitan Museum of Art – ‘painting, drawing and writing […] are all united in a single gesture’, an image ‘spontaneous in appearance’. But, while the Japanese kanji is a still image that signifies at once, Kim’s written notations, in delineating how long it takes to read them, not only convey the concept of time but visually represent it, which ASL – surpassing hieroglyphics and cuneiform – is uniquely suited to do.

Kim, who often relies on interpreters, told me that the echo is a metaphor for translation. (In the 2022 video Cues on Point, her longtime interpreter and friend Beth Staehle signs ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and ‘America the Beautiful’, songs that Kim herself performed at the Super Bowl in 2020, though the broadcast repeatedly cut her off.) Even as meaning may be lost with each interpretation, communication still happens, sometimes comically. You can tell a bad knock-knock joke, but the joke still lands.

Christine Sun Kim, ‘All Day All Night’ is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York until 6 July

^{Main image: Christine Sun Kim, Prolonged Echo, 2023, with Pointing, 2022, and Pointing, 2022, in Christine Sun Kim, ‘All Day All Night’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; photograph: Ron Amstutz}