{"id":119616,"date":"2025-11-03T16:16:13","date_gmt":"2025-11-03T16:16:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/119616\/"},"modified":"2025-11-03T16:16:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T16:16:13","slug":"ayoung-kim-a-korean-star-takes-over-new-york-at-moma-ps1-performa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/119616\/","title":{"rendered":"Ayoung Kim, a Korean Star, Takes Over New York at MoMA PS1, Performa"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tPerhaps more than any other artwork made during the 2020s, Ayoung Kim<\/a>\u2019s video Delivery Dancer\u2019s Sphere (2022) captures the dizzying, unsettled quality that characterized so much of the world under Covid-induced lockdown. But this is not a video about isolation or illness, or even a work about the pandemic, exactly. Instead, it deals with something else entirely: the experience of those who really suffered\u2014and survived\u2014while most of us holed up at home, and how those people conjured new universes for themselves in an altered society.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe video\u2019s tangled plot centers around two female delivery workers who zip around Seoul, where Kim is based, on sleek white motorcycles. These women seem to be pitted against, and compulsively attracted to, one another. As they undertake their drop-offs, navigating twisty alleyways with the help of an app, they fly through space and do battle. At times, documentary-style footage gives way to anime-style cartoon sequences; Kim also enlisted AI and gaming engines to produce some of her images.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Portrait<\/p>\n

\n\tDelivery Dancer\u2019s Sphere is so vivid because Kim got close to real-life delivery workers, whom she managed to shadow during the pandemic. \u201cI had this one interviewee, this amazing, skillful delivery worker, and I realized it was impossible to understand what it was like unless I followed her,\u201d Kim told me recently, speaking by Zoom from her studio in Seoul. \u201cSo, I asked her to bring me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe artist shared her screen with me and pulled up a PowerPoint presentation with hundreds of slides. She paused on one with pictures of a helmet-wearing person hugging a delivery worker who zips down a road. \u201cThat\u2019s me,\u201d Kim said of the passenger riding in tow. \u201cIt was really liberating,\u201d she continued, being able to visit \u201cso many strange and unknown, hidden places that I\u2019ve never been, even though I\u2019m so familiar with the city.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tAyoung Kim, Delivery Dancer\u2019s Arc: Inverse (still), 2024.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy the artist and ACC<\/p>\n

\n\tShe also got to observe how that worker navigated daily life via her employer\u2019s app, traveling according to a digital map and repeatedly accepting and declining calls from customers. \u201cAlmost 99 percent of contemporary people are the techno-precariat,\u201d Kim said, referring to a class whose life has been made unstable by our digital overlords. \u201cWe don\u2019t know what\u2019s actually going on behind big tech companies\u2019 regimes. I\u2019m curious about [their] reshaping of our understanding of time and temporality.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tKim has been making heady videos and installations about labor, capitalism, and worlds to come for over a decade now. But despite having shown widely in South Korea, Kim\u2019s work has only recently started appearing in multiple venues in the US and Europe.<\/p>\n

\n\tTate in London acquired Delivery Dancer\u2019s Sphere out of Frieze Seoul in 2022, and since then, the video and its follow-ups have since been shown frequently, with one recently appearing on the facade of the M+ museum in Hong Kong earlier this year. Following a showing at Berlin\u2019s Hamburger Bahnhof museum this past spring, Delivery Dancer\u2019s Sphere and the other two films in the \u201cDelivery Dancer\u201d series will head next to MoMA PS1 in New York, which is staging Kim\u2019s first US solo exhibition, opening this week. Later this month, Kim will also debut a new \u201cDelivery Dancer\u201d work, a motion-capture piece involving live stunt performers, at the Performa festival in New York.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMany people work with AI, many people work with data, but she\u2019s going a few steps further,\u201d said Defne Ayas, the curator of Kim\u2019s Performa commission. \u201cI think the art world really has been waiting for somebody like her.\u201d Only half-jokingly, Ayas called Kim \u201cour prophetess.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe grind has been intense for Kim, who recently won a $100,000 award from the Guggenheim Museum and LG. Kim used to largely work alone, but in the past two years, she has brought on five full-time studio managers, only two of whom are charged with helping Kim use gaming engines and other technologies. (The other three aid Kim in liaising with her many collaborators, of which there are quite a few these days.) It only recently dawned on Kim, 46, that she wasn\u2019t \u201cthat young artist\u201d anymore, as she put it.<\/p>\n

\n\tStill, in between an onslaught of exhibitions and commissions, Kim has prioritized watching films and TV shows in her spare time. During our Zoom, she revealed a range of inspirations, including \u00c6on Flux, an animated MTV series from the \u201990s about a dominatrix\u2013cum\u2013secret agent in a futuristic world, and more recent examples from a genre of anime known as GL, or Girls\u2019 Love, which centers female friendships with erotic overtones. She described a \u201cfascination with female-to-female antagonism, love and romance, emotional things that are entangled.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDespite the role that moving-image media has played in shaping Kim as an artist, and despite her art even having been shown at film festivals, she said that, according to \u201cthe dutiful, authoritative dogma, my work is not seen as cinema.\u201d None of the \u201cDelivery Dancers\u201d works have a plot that is easy to follow, and the last piece in the trilogy, an astonishing three-screen installation called Delivery Dancer\u2019s Arc: 0\u00b0 Receiver (2024), toggles frequently between genres and aspect ratios.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tAyoung Kim, Delivery Dancer\u2019s Sphere, 2022.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy the artist and Gallery Hyundai<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Kim approaches her work as a traditional filmmaker might, writing extensive shot lists and storyboarding sequences prior to shooting. \u201cI try to describe every sequence in a very dense detail, because I have to share it with our production team,\u201d she said. But she also added, \u201cIn editing, I change the plot quite a lot, in terms of the sequence of the scenes. I make it more labyrinthine in the end.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe expressed a deep reverence for puzzling kinds of filmmaking, including Alain Resnais\u2019s modernist masterpiece Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and the works of Hong Sang-soo, one of the great living Korean auteurs. Kim claimed that few would be able to tell how much these movies had influenced the \u201cDelivery Dancer\u201d series. \u201cIt\u2019s the multiplicity, the possibility of opening multiple worlds\u2014all the possibility of one shot, one sequence\u201d Kim said.<\/p>\n

\n\tBorn in 1979 in Seoul, Kim initially trained to become a graphic designer, studying that subject as an undergraduate at Kookmin University. During her 20s, amid what she described as a \u201cvery hard time in my life,\u201d she left Korea for the UK, where she started over again, studying photography at the London College of Communication. She immersed herself in academic conversations about postcolonialism, but she had what she called a \u201cproblem\u201d: The UK was an imperialist power, \u201cbut it was also dominating postcolonial discourse as well,\u201d as she put it.<\/p>\n

\n\tNewly aware of her status as an Asian woman abroad, she began to reassess Hollywood science-fiction films she\u2019d come to love, including Blade Runner (1982). In many of these works, \u201cno Asian entities have their own agency,\u201d Kim pointed out. She began to ask herself: \u201cWhat could be [a form of] agency-retaining, somehow thinking about our future?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tInitially, she answered that question by journeying far into the past. Certain works drew on histories that had not directly touched Kim. Her series \u201cPH Express\u201d (2011\u201312) around Port Hamilton, a group of islands in Korea\u2019s Jeju Strait that was occupied by British troops during the 19th century. Other pieces were more personal. A group of installations collectively titled \u201cZepheth, Whale Oil from the Hanging Gardens to You\u201d (2014\u201315) meditate on Saudi Arabia\u2019s oil industry of the 1980s; the artist\u2019s father took part, becoming one of many migrants to join the country\u2019s workforce during that boom period. Bodies of work like this one earned the attention of curators such as Okwui Enwezor, who included a piece from the \u201cZepheth\u201d series in his 2015 Venice Biennale.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut around 2016, as Kim began to read speculative sci-fi by Octavia Butler and Donna Haraway, her work shifted course. \u201cI realized, \u2018Oh, my God, you can\u2019t research that much! You\u2019re not a historian, and you\u2019re not rebuilding history.\u2019 An artist\u2019s role is not writing history again.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tAyoung Kim, Delivery Dancer\u2019s Sphere, 2022.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy the artist and Gallery Hyundai<\/p>\n

\n\tKim\u2019s work since then has appeared futuristic, and indeed, one of her latest works, a piece that will debut at the forthcoming Powerhouse Parramatta museum in Sydney, conjures a gleaming mall with Baroque and Neoclassical flourishes that\u2019s host to a Dancer of the Year contest. (The film is really an action movie, Kim promised.) Kim showed me renderings of her imagined mall, which looked to me like a building from 2125, not 2025, with impossibly large towers made of glass and metal.<\/p>\n

\n\tRuba Katrib, the curator of Kim\u2019s PS1 show, said that the artist deliberately constructs an unusual continuum between past, present, and future. \u201cIt\u2019s this nonlinear time,\u201d she said, where \u201cyou\u2019re stuck in this loop. Her characters are trying to escape the loop, but they can\u2019t, really. Maybe they don\u2019t want to escape.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tKatrib also described Kim\u2019s films as being romantic, as did Ayas, the Performa commission curator. The latter work, titled Body^n. will involve performers enacting choreographies live before an audience. (Kim Cha-I, who conceived the choreography for the Netflix series Squid Game, was among those who helped Kim with the piece.) With the help of motion-capture technology, their images will be transported to digital landscapes via screens. Ayas said that the performers\u2019 movements are so intimate that she asked Kim: \u201cShould we turn the lights off here, to make sure their love is expressed?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tKim herself admitted that the characters in her \u201cDelivery Dancer\u201d works are enacting a kind of courtship. \u201cTheir love stories will never be fulfilled in the entire universe,\u201d she told me, \u201cbecause somehow, they meet and part and meet and part again and again, as the worlds reset and the stories restart again and again. It\u2019s their destiny.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Perhaps more than any other artwork made during the 2020s, Ayoung Kim\u2019s video Delivery Dancer\u2019s Sphere (2022) captures…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":119617,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,71527,308,93,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-119616","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-ayoung-kim","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-ie","16":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119616\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/119617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}