Signifier versus signified, symbol versus sign—that intellectual exercise from the 1990s has been a more profound lived experience for Korean American artist Christine Sun Kim, now based in Berlin. Born in 1980, she earned a BFA and two MFAs—from the Rochester Institute of Technology, the School of Visual Arts, and Bard College—before going on to show works at venues such as Amsterdam’s de Appel Arts Center and London’s Tate Modern.

Kim uses and advocates for American Sign Language—an autonomous, grammatically complex mode of communication—while challenging societal norms regarding sound through her drawings, performances, and videos. In our forthcoming July/August issue, critic Xintian Wang analyzes Kim’s first one-person museum exhibition, “All Day All Night,” which runs through July 6 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The show features charcoal drawings and other works that subtly transfigure musical notation, images, and infographics to plumb the underlying nature of all discourse.