In 1951, when the experimental composer John Cage visited an anechoic chamber, a scientific room engineered to absorb resonance, at Harvard University, his ensuing narrative of that experience would shape the discourse of sound and silence in the decades to come. Famously, Cage became aware of two tones persisting beneath the absolute silence: the pulse of his nervous system at work and his blood circulating.  Beneath the surface of supposed silence, a field of experience erupts. Cage would go on to describe silence as “all sound, all the time” (“Experimental Music,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings, Wesleyan University Press, 1961, 8).

Cage’s observation transformed the understanding of sound and perception in his cultural moment. Yet what was a revelation for Cage and the midcentury avant-garde art milieu is, for many people, straightforwardly the sensory encounters of everyday life. The artist Christine Sun Kim is one such figure, observing: “[Cage] said he could hear his heart beating. People were thinking that was so groundbreaking. I wanted to say, I’ve had that experience my whole entire life—and other deaf people have too” (Robert Barry, “‘Sound Is Expensive’: An Interview with Christine Sun Kim,” The Quietus, 2017). Kim’s artistic practice calls attention to these normative assumptions on the part of the hearing world, with work that demands a more expansive understanding of listening.

It is the riotous field of fully embodied listening—or listening “otherwise”—that Kim visualized in her solo exhibition Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, overtaking the grand stairwell, lobby gallery, third floor, and the entire eighth floor. Born deaf, Kim uses drawing, video, technology, performance, and installation, including large murals, to investigate her relationship with sound and language, not only spoken but also American Sign Language and the grammar of images and gesture. Indeed, Kim is no more a “sound artist” (as she has at times erroneously been dubbed) than she is a “Deaf artist.” As the selection of work on view demonstrated, her practice often aligns most closely with tactics of institutional critique, exemplified by artists like Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, and Louise Lawler, but instead of casting her sights strictly on the museum, Kim leverages her experiences to surface difference within everyday interpersonal as well as institutional and systemic orientations.

The Whitney exhibition foregrounded what is perhaps the most eminent medium of Kim’s practice: her “info-graphic” drawings. These pie charts, notations, and visualizations, hand-drawn in charcoal, testify to the isolation, ableism, and racism she experiences in her encounters with the hearing world. One drawing, Degrees of My Deaf Rage in the Art World (2018), narrates particular experiences of navigating professional life by using the visual language of angle diagrams: “legit rage” (a right angle) measures “Bard MFA,” while “reflex rage” charts “curators who think it’s fair to split my salary fee with interpreters,” and “straight up rage” attaches to “Rijksmuseum front desk manager.” Kim presents her personal experiences in the format of information, which is to say, supposedly objective or modulated data points. But the specificity of the drawing’s autobiographical anecdotes, buoyed by the irregular, smudged application of the charcoal figures and captions, insists on particularity.

Jacques Rancière describes how art “distributes” sensations within our collective world, determining what makes certain individuals and objects visible or invisible, heard or elided. And since the social values assigned to the senses are not as neutral as one might presume, if an artist wishes to cultivate a more inclusive public sphere, their work must also redistribute the social values assigned to those senses. Writing on Kim, literary scholar Michael Davidson has shown that part of the efficacy and radical insistence of her work lies in the artist’s baseline awareness that “voice, as the presumed site of interiority and consciousness, must be distributed among its various platforms, prostheses, and producers” (“Siting Sound: Redistributing the Senses in Christine Sun Kim,” in Distressing Language: Disability and the Poetics of Error, New York University Press, 2022, 54).

This aim is achieved not only through the subject matter but through the material properties of Kim’s work. The drawings are rife with errors, alterations, and the process of the works’ creation, from smudges and fingerprints to stray marks. Less visible in reproduction but very noticeable when viewed in person, these traces of making are also traces of touch that resonate visually. Thus, even at the level of materiality, Kim doesn’t allow the viewer to look away from the politics of sound. In visualizing the fraught intersections of sound, different forms of language, methods of communication, touch, and sensation, Kim’s drawings insist that viewers confront how hearing and oral language function as a baseline for entry into the social sphere. In addition, the large scale of most of the drawings is notable; many measure around five-by-five feet, suggesting that their stakes are not exclusively personal but in fact cultural and societal. Kim’s experiences are not presented at the intimate scale of private subjectivity, but rather implicate a collective audience in upholding the status quo.

The scale of the drawings also orients them towards public, shared reception, a feature that is nowhere more overt than in Kim’s highway billboards and sprawling wall murals, such as Ghost(ed) Notes (2024), in which oversized musical staff lines undulate across a long expanse of white gallery wall. Instead of the rigid lines of standard notation, here the staff bucks and dips to circumvent the notes, which are now forced to hover below or above. Kim has described how the staff lines—stand-ins for the standard operating procedures of everyday social interactions, institutions, technology, and the like—actively avoid the notes. In this visual metaphor, the hand-drawn black notes become people whose bodies are purposefully overlooked, their existence elided. The apparatus of society contorts itself so as not to support, frame, or be in relation to these “others.” In deploying the visual language of musical notation, Kim calls attention to the normative forms of listening, not only to critique ableism but to open up a more expansive understanding of embodied listening. This is the gesture that Davidson points to when he observes that Kim’s work emerges at the intersection of aesthetic categories when they “encounter sensoria that defy what they are meant to contain” (“Siting Sound: Redistributing the Senses in Christine Sun Kim,” 52).

ATTENTION (2022), cocreated with her partner, the artist Thomas Mader, depicts the other position of this “ghosting.” Kim does not usually produce sculptural installations, but in this piece, comprised of two massive red nylon arms, the work literalizes touch. At periodic intervals, a motor kicks on, blasting air into the arms, causing them to become erect, wavering and trembling out from the gallery walls, and as a result also tapping intermittently against a large block of locally mined stone sited between the two. The pointing index fingers tap, tap, tap against the stone as if trying to get its attention, a common physical cue when communicating with nonhearing people.  The work suggests that with time and repetition, even the pliant fabric of the inflatables will begin to wear down the stone, chipping away at its surface and altering its form. Meanwhile, for a hearing visitor, when the arms are activated, the gallery is inundated with the white noise of the machinery and the fans. It is only when the motor turns off, and the arms fall limply to the floor again—the work no longer activated—that (supposed) silence settles over the space.

While Kim’s work is often glossed as a straightforward critique of the hearing- and orality-centric strictures of the social sphere, her practice is in fact more subtle. Across a variety of media formats, Kim localizes the politics of listening. Listening as hearing, listening as deaf, listening as Korean American, listening as parent, listening as woman, listening as other, listening “otherwise.” Theorist Mladen Dolar classifies different forms of voicing, including an “object voice which does not go up in smoke in the conveyance of meaning [ . . . but is an] object which functions as a blind spot in the call and as a disturbance of aesthetic appreciation” (A Voice and Nothing More, MIT Press, 2006, 4). The voice(s) of All Day All Night similarly do not empty into meaning, because the formats of graphics, musical notation, captioning, and the line insist that viewers remain attuned to their formal logics and transmission. Nor does Kim’s voice cohere into an object of aesthetic contemplation (as in a song). Instead, Kim presents the sounds and silences as an excess of meaning, a remainder of hearing, and an echo of silence.

The acuity of Kim’s critique lies less in its sonic properties than in its recognition that listening is always relational. In this regard, her work activates a feminist politics of voicing as developed by Adriana Cavarero, who describes how the voice is always specifically embodied, yet always for another (For More Than One Voice, Stanford University Press, 2005, 173–82). The voice that transmits from Kim’s artistic practice is not solely the subjective experience of the artist herself, nor does she aim to speak on behalf of the deaf community. What the work surfaces is this perpetual relation of voicing. Whether uttered, gestured, written, imaged, or felt, voicing generates, in Cavarero’s words, “an interactive space of reciprocal exposure” (For More Than One Voice, 190). It is this interactive space that All Day All Night invites us to inhabit with our wholly sensing selves.