HOLDING THE LINE

RIDING THE SUBWAY to the opening of the Christine Sun Kim exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in February, I thought about how her work had become a feature of the visual environment of the city over the past several years, hijacking advertising spaces with her charcoal sketches and quivering all-caps handwriting. Kim is best known for what she calls “transcript drawings” and “infographics,” rendered in charcoal and pastel, but she also works in sculpture, sound art, video, performance, murals, and public art installations at the scale of a cityscape. In 2019, as part of the initiative Art in Ad Places, she replaced the ads on old pay-phone booths with a red, white, and blue poster bearing the black outline of a hand signing “I love you” in American Sign Language (ASL), a frown scrawled on the palm, accompanied by the text LOVING YOU IS EXHAUSTING. A commentary on the ambivalence of being a Deaf citizen of the United States, Loving you is exhausting also offered Kim (who is Deaf) a chance to commandeer the medium created by Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone’s inventor and a noted opponent of sign language. In 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, she created a set of digital Times Square billboards, Dear Essential Workers, that pulsed with empty musical staff lines and the words THANK YOU. The Whitney installed her first billboard, Too Much Future, near one end of the High Line in 2018. Featuring a gloss of the ASL sign for “someday” or “future” against a white background, Too Much Future is a black inscription of a double arching hand movement—except too dark and too thick, signaling a coming storm or perhaps just anxiety. In these and many other works, Kim has installed Deaf culture assertively around the city, making it impossible to ignore. 

Two small but important group shows, in 2012, helped launch her career and illuminate the lasting tensions in the ways her work is defined and claimed by others. Both shows took place while she was completing her second MFA degree, in music and sound, at Bard College. (She earned her first MFA in 2006 from the School of Visual Arts.) “What Can a Body Do?” opened in October 2012 at Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery in Pennsylvania. Organized by Amanda Cachia, the show situated Kim’s work in a new wave of disability arts and became a landmark in disability justice–informed curation. The following month, “Gesture Sign Art: Deaf Culture/Hearing Culture”opened at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien in Berlin, which brought the work of deaf artists—many of whom identified as culturally Deaf and were affiliated through ASL—into conversation with that of hearing artists like John Cage.¹ Given that Deaf people continue to be medicalized, “Gesture Sign Art” also staged a symbolic overthrow of Bethanien, a former hospital.

“Gesture Sign Art” engaged with a broader set of cultural investigations in sound studies and sound art about the multimodal aspects of sound, from production to transmission to reception. Electronic sounds, sounds moving through water, sounds experienced through vibration—deaf expertise was one form among many in this slippery medium (newly manipulable with cheap digital tools). Deaf sound art can just be sound art, or it can perform a kind of subjugated expertise, bearing witness to entrenched cultural biases about appropriate sounds and voices, sound ownership, and power.² Kim contributed two kinds of “transcript drawing” to these exhibitions: transcriptions of sound at Haverford (her “speaker drawings,” made by placing ink and paper or wood on vibrating speakers) and transcriptions of ASL in Berlin (All. Day. and All. Night., 2012, from which the Whitney show takes its title, composed of charcoal arcs as if traced by a hand signing those phrases). Over the past decade, Kim has taken up new graphical tropes and new media, but her work continues to explore this duality of “access”: the kaleidoscope of possible Deaf sonic experience, and, for hearing audiences, alternative visualizations of ASL and Deaf culture. As she probes the forms that sound and communication might take, access becomes a substrate feeding unexpected offshoots.

All. Day. and All. Night. next appeared at New York’s Museum of Modern Art as part of “Soundings: A Contemporary Score” (2013), the institution’s first major exhibition of sound art. If the disability arts community helped lift Kim’s career, her remarkable success has in turn propelled the field. Her current survey at the Whitney (which will travel to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2026) is the largest yet by any artist affiliated with what Neta Alexander and I call “the new disability arts movement,” the term marking the emergence of a disability-first program while acknowledging the longer history of disabled artists working on or with impairment, illness, and other forms of material difference.³ Kim’s mural Echo Trap, 2021—a series of black arcs, bouncing movement lines, and the words HAND PALM (alluding to the sign for echo in ASL)—also featured centrally in the largest institutional show of international disability art to date, “Crip Time,” where it circled the three-story central foyer of the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt in fall 2021.

In his 2024 book Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation, theater arts scholar Patrick McKelvey links the beginnings of a self-directed and self-conscious disability arts movement to legislative and economic changes in the United States that provided “rehabilitation” funds to disabled arts workers in the 1970s and ’80s, and more importantly to the ability of artists to navigate those funding structures while resisting their therapeutic framing. Kim herself has pointed to the importance of the Americans with Disabilities Act—signed into being when she was ten years old—for her education and career: “Once the ADA was passed, a lot of things changed. There were more captions on television. In high school, we had a CART (Communication Access Real-time Translation) reporter who provided notes. We could just pay attention to the instruction and the notes were given to us. Interpreters were more accessible and provided more information,” she writes in the exhibition catalogue. “The ADA and the internet were two things that changed my life.”⁴ The 1990s also saw the founding of academic disability studies programs, followed in the early 2000s by significant growth in digital access tools, as well as by burgeoning funding, awards, and other opportunities earmarked for “disability arts.”

As the field has emerged, it has demanded a significant reclaiming of disability aesthetics—starting at the level of the line.⁵ Earlier on the day I visited Kim’s exhibition at the Whitney, I came across Jean Dubuffet’s public sculpture Group of Four Trees, 1972—a cluster of knobby black-and-white objects that look like forty-foot-high toadstools—in a plaza in the Financial District, which got me thinking about the liberated presence of disability in urban public spaces, and also about disability and the line. Dubuffet described the sculpture as an “unleashed graphism” based on doodling with a ballpoint pen.⁶ A founder of the art brut movement in the mid-twentieth century, he was inspired by the “outsider” work of those who were in fact excluded from formal training and the art market, including institutionalized disabled people. Dubuffet understood “the disabled line” to be raw, “primitive,” a scribble. (As artist Park McArthur writes in the catalogue for Kim’s show, “What a hilarious open secret: art has a disavowed crush on disability.”⁷)

The notion of an errant line emitted from disabled bodies, intentionally or unintentionally, is inextricable from the modern origins of graphic inscription and other graphic methods in the nineteenth century. Eadweard Muybridge, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, and Bell himself—among many other scientists—worked on methods for automatically tracing disabled voices and movements, naming and fixing disorder: a heartbeat, a limp, an EKG, a stutter. The concept of disability as measurably and even predictably atypical fed the other graphic methods that simultaneously emerged in statistics and scientific management: pie charts for populations in the census, time charts for documenting and controlling labor, bar charts of death rates and other social problems, x-y graphs with curves showing frequency outliers and predicting risk.

Over more than a decade, Kim has taken back the line, as author and object. A substantial format for her work is the repurposed or invented inscription technique, notation script, or “infographic.” Her riffs on seemingly objective inscriptions and notations for sound and motion, often paired with handwritten lettering or musical symbols, point back not just to the body of the maker, but to her cultural world. They convey the repetitive boredom and oppression, but also the humor, in human measurement. When I have written about Kim’s work before, charting the image-alphabet she has assembled, extended, and recombined across her career, I have taken a lot of pleasure in decoding the web of connections and inside jokes each new series of drawings brings.⁸ But I hadn’t considered carefully enough how the line is itself an object of serious study in her work. The staff lines, the score, the time curve, the decibel scale, the angles and segments in pie charts—these elements do more than translate and communicate. Kim’s hands give us critical theories and histories of governing lines, all the while conjuring distinct Deaf lines.

As Kim probes the forms that sound and communication might take, access becomes a substrate feeding unexpected offshoots.

Take her reworking of the decibel scale. The catalogue for “All Day All Night” includes photographs of her audiograms across many years, wherein the cosmos that is hearing is measured as a series of points on tone and decibel yardsticks. Alongside these published audiograms, she narrates the absurdity of the frequent tests she has undergone to redemonstrate “deafness” for various social services. Two years ago, when I was coediting an issue of Osiris, a flagship journal in the history of science, on the theme of disability history, I hired someone to photograph Kim’s 2014 work How to Measure Loudness in the apartment of its collector so we could reproduce it on our cover—a direct retort to the history of audiometry.⁹ (Created early in Kim’s career, it had been sold before it was professionally documented.) Kim measures loudness via a descriptive scale, shifting the seemingly objective audiogram from an individualizing register into a personal one. What I had missed before attending her exhibition is that How to Measure Loudness has a mate, How to Measure Quietness, 2014. Sketched in blue pastel, on a scale of dynamic markings from music (from mp, medium soft, to the supersoft fiction of ppppppppp), Kim’s quiet scale starts at the same point as her loudness scale: with sleep. As quietness grows in amount, so does inner turmoil, until at the top of the range we find anxiety, silent treatment, and the misspelled PANIA (panic). As a pair, the scales do more than replace the quantity of physical volume with the subjective unit of “loudness”; they throw loudness and quietness into question. Which one should be the yardstick? How are both performed through the act of listening or other forms of reception? If deafness is multiple, is not hearing also variable, normal audiograms aside?

Taking in Kim’s survey, one gets a sense of the development of her graphic vocabulary over time, the arguments her series make, and the recursion and expansion of these arguments into far-reaching disability theories. Having attended many of her earlier group and solo shows, small and large, I had mistakenly believed that her practice was moving from the graphic inscription and notation of sound and sign, to what she calls “infographics”—in other words, from the translation of physical states to the visualization of complex sets of data (real or fictional). Several reassembled series alongside newer pieces in the survey make clear that inscription continues to propel the Deaf line in Kim’s work, taking on new formats. If her arcs of arm and hand movements talk back to the vocal inscription tools employed for decades in oralist institutions and speech pathology clinics, in a new series they become frame as well as content. All Day All Night, 2023, uses the pastel arcs of 2012 to shape the perimeters of blank (raw) canvas: an ASL fossil, a Deaf sculpture, a set of instructions—and an imperative restatement of a pivotal work from the outset of Kim’s career. She also reiterates notational symbols in newer work. Hand icons, which she has previously employed to represent signing, now are repurposed along with motion lines from comics (a genre that provides other letters in her alphabet) in a series about the holding of debt—the debts the US owes to deaf labor and technical innovation, the debts into which most citizens are now conscripted. Punning on the meme “how do you hold your cigarette,” this series offers a gallows humor that contrasts with the deadpan tone often attributed to Kim’s work. 

At the Whitney exhibition, an architectural-scale mural, Ghost(ed) Notes, 2024/2025, greets the viewer exiting the elevator onto the main floor of galleries. Sparse musical notes on four wobbly staff lines (indicating the four-fingered ASL sign for staff) run along the walls to a floor-to-ceiling window facing the Hudson River. The mural, which is also currently installed on the facade of the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, is described as a reflection on both “ghosting” someone and exclusion from mainstream communication, “ghost notes” in music being pitchless and minimally or subperceptually present in rhythm. In New York, the mural gains other connotations, as it overlooks the so-called Ghost Pier (David Hammons’s Day’s End, 2021), a steel outline of the former Pier 52, a haunt for queer cruising and art that was demolished in the 1970s, just prior to the AIDS epidemic in the city. 

Kim’s more recent work in the medium of infographics is also something of a return, as she trained in graphic design for a year during her undergraduate studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Infographics, as Kim has noted, are taught as “something that’s easy to communicate in any language, to communicate any idea anywhere in the world at any time.”¹⁰ In the early days of graphic methods in statistics and the sciences, charts and graphs were meant to be efficient, clearing a thicket of abundant information in the heyday of print. They might also reveal patterns or aid analysis through condensation, comparison, and juxtaposition. They would enable facts to seemingly “speak for themselves,” an affordance marketers eagerly picked up on, deploying charts as tools for advertising and persuasion.¹¹ Scientific managers further weaponized graphic facticity to dictate work and control time off, to allot or take away funding, to rank and condemn.

Kim’s infographics seize authority, displaying Deaf data rather than universals.¹² If they are about Deaf experience, they are also about pie-chart history and form. When William Playfair introduced pie charts in 1801, the whole was the nation and the parts showcased population, production, or military might. Generations of design successors have insisted that pie charts are difficult to read and even amount to optical informatic illusions, but we are still stuck with them. In Kim’s artworks, these and other charts, meant to be read in a textbook or journal (or now, on a phone), have become increasingly massive. The map is bigger than the territory, the gigantism of a circle (e.g., that of When I Play the Deaf Card, 2019, divided into thirteen slices or occasions) indicating the scale of the action or problem, and at other times serving an anti-minoritizing function. Far from allowing instant reading, Kim’s facts cannot be taken in with a glance. The vastness of framed white space and the comparatively minuscule labels arrest the viewer, requiring them to crane their neck, to move back and forth or close to the frame in order to read from part to part to whole while also weighing the blanks.

At the Whitney opening, I ran into a member of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s accessibility team standing in front of Degrees of My Deaf Rage in the Art World, 2018, which features a series of acute and obtuse angles that look as if they were pulled from a pie chart. One acute angle was labeled “Guggenheim Accessibility Manager.” Here was another example of Kim’s funny-angry recasting of an inherently abstract and dehumanizing form. We laughed and wondered who it was. I recalled that one of Kim’s first jobs in New York, in 2002, was with the New York Society for the Deaf, as a case manager assisting other Deaf people with access and bureaucracy in their daily lives in the city. Then, in 2007, she was hired to work on accessibility at the Whitney itself. So much work in the new disability arts has been infrastructural, theorizing exclusion and disablement rather than disability identity (see McArthur’s “Ramps” from 2014, a collection of improvised wheelchair ramps borrowed from institutions where the artist had worked or exhibited), or resignifying stigma symbols (see Constantina Zavitsanos’s Call to Post [Violet], 2019/2024, a giant carpeted ramp bathed in neon purple light and vibrating with infrasonic sound, inspired by the aesthetic of “magic fingers beds” in no-tell motels). Not all of Kim’s work is “about” disability, but it necessarily comes from her perspective, her sensorium, her hand.

Some of my favorite works by Kim employ graphic methods in ways that are deliberately challenging or inaccessible for hearing audiences, rather than offering a visual bridge between languages and cultures. John Lee Clark, a DeafBlind poet and scholar, published the memorable diatribe “Against Access” in 2021, demanding artistry rather than sanitized compliance in the realm of accessibility. He also asked, “Why is it always about them? Why is it about their including or not including us? Why is it never about us and whether or not we include them?”¹³ Kim’s Venn diagram series responds to these questions. It reminds us that this particular tool—the Venn diagram—was not designed to be an iconic representation of phenomena, but rather a little machine. When John Venn popularized the diagram in Symbolic Logic (1881), he used it to test propositions and make deductions. Where two or more circles or categories overlap, they are thought to have shared attributes (“some A is B”). In her Venn diagrams, Kim presses uncomfortable categories together, exploring the space of overlap as one of incongruence and friction. Her circles are irregularly shaped, the charcoal lines smudged. 

One of these diagrams, Pronouns in American Sign Language, 2020, usually hangs on a wall in my apartment. I have come over time to understand some of this simple machine’s operations, and to be greeted with different outputs as input from the world changes. It is composed of three circles, each labeled “point,” which is the action for a singular pronoun in ASL (I, you, he/she/it). Where one circle overlaps with another, Kim has written “plural point” (a sweeping motion to indicate we, you all, they). In an interview about this series, Kim noted that infographics can “[mimic] gestures or body language.”¹⁴ The gestural scale of Pronouns both maps and encourages an ASL conversation space. I often think about the vast white space it marks off on my wall as staging, the minimal lines and letters serving as a sort of spike tape.

Where all three circles overlap in Pronouns, rather than finding shared attributes (identity, community), we find the words BLAME GAME. This might represent infighting and an acknowledgment of the internal diversity of “the Deaf community”—a different take from Venn on intersectionality. It also calls attention to the charged culture of pronouns at a time of profound transphobia. ASL pronouns are often described as genderless (point, plural point); however, “he,” “she,” and “they” can have different accompanying mouth morphemes or facial expressions. More broadly, gender-neutral terminology has become a topic of debate in signed as well as spoken languages. In English, simply naming or listing one’s pronouns—or titling an artwork Pronouns—has become indelibly politicized. Native English speakers who visit or Zoom into my apartment are often alarmed by BLAME GAME, a glibly assonant phrase, not to mention all the pointing. They ask, with concern, what it means. As an abstraction and comparison machine, Pronouns provokes anxiety, getting at the dangers of correlation.