Christine Sun Kim has a way of making us question things we normally take for granted. In “All Day All Night”, sound is not something we simply hear. It becomes a visual, physical, and sometimes playful presence that fills the gallery and changes the way we move through it.
At the Whitney Museum of American Art, Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night, on view from February 8 through September 28, 2025, brings together work from across the artist's practice, revealing how consistently she challenges the boundaries of communication. Musical notation, written language, American Sign Language, gesture, diagrams, and unexpected visual marks become materials in their own right.
There is a wonderful sense of humor throughout the exhibition. Some works catch us off guard, while others make us pause because a familiar idea suddenly feels unfamiliar. Kim has a gift for taking something as ordinary as a line, a phrase, or a symbol and making us wonder who created its rules in the first place. Her work is clever without feeling distant, and serious without losing its sense of play.
The longer we spend with the pieces, the more the walls themselves seem to participate in the conversation. Our photographs capture fragments of that experience: a detail here, an expressive gesture there, a work that catches the eye before its meaning fully settles in. They also remind us of how much of Kim's work depends on scale, movement, and the relationship between the body and the surrounding space.
Perhaps that is what makes the exhibition so engaging. We enter expecting to think about sound, yet we leave thinking about much more: who is included in a conversation, how meaning travels, and why we so often assume that communication must look or sound a certain way.
Kim gives us no single answer. Instead, she leaves us with something more interesting: the feeling that there are many more ways to communicate than we have been taught to notice.
