Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night
The Whitney Museum, New York
February 8 – July 2025
Opening at the Whitney Museum of American Art on February 8, 2025, Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night is the artist’s first major museum survey. Co-organized by the Whitney Museum and Walker Art Center, the exhibition foregrounds how Christine Sun Kim (b. 1980, Orange County, California; lives and works in Berlin, Germany) utilizes sound, language, and the complexities of communication in her wide-ranging approach to artmaking. All Day All Night brings together over 90 artworks spanning 2011 to the present across three floors of the Museum and features drawings, site-specific murals, paintings, video installations, and sculptures.
Using musical notation, infographics, and language—both in her native American Sign Language (ASL) and written English—Kim has produced a perceptive, poetic, humorous, and political body of work. In her artwork, activism, and public voice, Kim confronts the systemic marginalization of the Deaf community and subordination of access while celebrating the importance of community and family. Inspired by similarly named works made at different moments in her career, the exhibition’s title, All Day All Night, points to the energy Kim brings to her artistic practice; she is relentlessly experimental, iterative, and dedicated to sharing her lived experiences with a broad spectrum of audiences.
“The exhibition invites viewers to reconsider the importance placed on sound,” said Jennie Goldstein, Jennifer Rubio Associate Curator of the Collection at the Whitney Museum. “It encourages us to consider the diversity and richness of Deaf culture and the complexities of identity more broadly, in relation to artistic collaboration, parenthood, immigration, or diasporic experience.”
Exhibition Overview – Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night
Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night takes its title from early drawings and more recent shaped canvases that visualize the ASL hand movement of the sun moving over the horizon and then dipping below it. Spanning three floors and echoing throughout the Museum, the exhibition traces Kim’s work across painting, sculpture, drawing, moving image, performance, large-scale murals, and collaborations with other artists, made between 2011 and 2024. The thematic presentation cuts across time and space to consider some of the artist’s core concerns with Deaf lived experience, the importance of family, friends, and community, and how we negotiate shared social spaces.
