Artist Christine Sun Kim on Deaf Culture, Making Sound Art, and Her Major Show at the Whitney
If the role of an artist is to observe and critique society at a remove, Christine Sun Kim could rightly claim she was born for the job: She’s a Deaf woman of color with ADHD, as well as a first-generation American who has herself expatriated to Germany.
“Oftentimes I wonder if my upbringing—being in an immigrant household, never being entirely comfortable in one language—pushed me to look further into what is beyond the construct of text and letters,” the 44-year-old says through an interpreter, sitting in the Berlin flat she shares with her husband and two young children. “At this point, I also see being an artist as just so much fun, like I’m making up for what I didn’t get when I was younger.
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In that case, Kim must have had a blast over the past 15 years. In that time, she has built a multidisciplinary practice that explores sound and communication in our culture by employing a provocative blend of physicality, text, sign language, symbols, music, and biting humor. Her performance piece Nap Disturbance (2016), for example, involves making noises with chairs, plates, and other household objects that might awaken a hearing person. Her 2018 “Deaf Rage” series of drawings measures her ire at such everyday indignities as “Uber driver calls instead of texting” and “Being offered a wheelchair at the arrival gate… and the Braille menu at restaurants.”
The Whitney Museum of American Art will recognize Kim with a mid-career survey opening this month and traveling to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in March 2026. The Whitney venue will be a homecoming of sorts: Kim helped design and led tours there in American Sign Language (ASL) before becoming a full-time artist. Since then, she has created a mural for the museum’s billboard program, appeared in the famed Whitney Biennial, and performed there.
That Kim homed in on sound art might seem counterintuitive. At first, she was turned off by it. “Sound was always something that I dismissed, or didn’t engage with,” she says. “I wanted to show that I could survive in this world without using my voice, without lipreading.”
But going to Berlin for a residency in 2008—and experiencing yet another culture—expanded her thinking. She returned to the U.S. to study sound art at Bard College and began making wittily incisive work that mined her own lived experience.
“Look, I was not funny growing up,” she says. “I’ve become funny by force of life circumstances.”
Kim was born in 1980 in Orange County, Calif., to hearing parents newly arrived from South Korea. Her mom and dad initially tried to access cochlear implants for Kim and her Deaf older sister, but both were rejected, which she attributes to racism and income inequality: The clinicians, she believes, favored candidates whose families were fluent in English and could spend hours on speech therapy every week.
Sound could be a frightening abstraction. “Whenever we were told to be quiet, my sister and I always held our breath—we were scared that breathing made noise,” she recalls. “We didn’t know, which is funny now. The quieter you try to be, sometimes the more hostile the experience, such as holding your breath. Like, that’s fighting for your life.”
On the upside, her mom and dad learned ASL, unlike many hearing parents. When Kim told them she wanted to be an artist, they didn’t discourage her. “I think it was a little bit of acceptance of the circumstances they had been handed, maybe with a hint of defeat,” she says, quickly adding, “My parents have always told me I can do whatever I want.”
After spending several years immersed in sound art, Kim says, “I started to feel suffocated by it, and honestly, it was just so intangible, and I was itching for something tangible. I needed it.”
Seeking to put her hand back into her work, she began to draw with marker and then—after a tip from the distinguished painter Amy Sillman, who told her to “just create”—switched to charcoal. “I loved the mess,” Kim says of the notoriously smeary substance. “I love how it leaves marks. It says, ‘I was here, I was there.’ And if you have to erase something, you can never fully erase it. That was something I accepted about it.”
She has been less accepting of ceramics’ unpredictability in the kiln, though she hasn’t turned her back on the medium entirely: She just recently made a series of about 20 record stabilizers from clay with shapes that riff on signs for “distort.”
Kim also maintains a dual practice with her husband, Thomas Mader. An exhibition of their joint work will open at London’s Wellcome Collection in April. It was Mader, whom she met on her second trip to Berlin, who lured her to move there. At the outset of their relationship, she turned on a tape recorder in New York and mailed it to him with instructions to send it right back the same way—so as to capture the ambient noise of the round-trip journey—but never to listen to the recording, just as she couldn’t. She considers it their first collaboration.
“I’m silly or stupid, I don’t know, in the way that I always choose the hard path,” Kim says. “I’m Deaf, and I decided to be a sound artist, right? I moved to New York City. I decided to move countries. I just love to do things the hard way, apparently.”
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