{"id":222721,"date":"2026-01-08T05:42:33","date_gmt":"2026-01-08T05:42:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/222721\/"},"modified":"2026-01-08T05:42:33","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T05:42:33","slug":"ayoung-kim-is-stargazing-in-a-digital-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/222721\/","title":{"rendered":"Ayoung Kim Is Stargazing in a Digital World"},"content":{"rendered":"

Art Review<\/a><\/p>\n

Her exhibition at MoMA PS1 synthesizes live-action footage, video game engines, and generative AI to create an interlocking series of speculative narratives<\/p>\n


\n \"Min
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

\"Ayoung
\n Film still from Ayoung Kim, “Delivery Dancer\u2019s Arc: Inverse” (2024), three-channel video, color, two-channel sound, lighting installation, random video playback and lighting synchronization control program, sundial sculptures, graphic sheets and circular screens (image courtesy the artist and ACC; all other photos Min Park\/Hyperallergic)<\/p>\n

While many prominent Korean artists keep their studios abroad, Ayoung Kim remains rooted in Seoul\u2019s Nakwon Sangga \u2014 a once futuristic, now historic commercial complex. From here, she reimagines a city negotiating between the force of capitalism and the persistence of its past.<\/p>\n

Spread across the third-floor galleries at MoMA PS1, the video installations in Ayoung Kim: Delivery Dancer Codex<\/a> synthesize live-action footage, video game engines, and generative AI to create an interlocking series of speculative narratives centered on two female drivers, En Storm and Ernst Mo. \u201cDelivery Dancer\u2019s Sphere\u201d (2022), the first in the trilogy, presents a gamified delivery system in which a \u201cDancemaster\u201d distributes assignments, directing drivers throughout the city. Its demand for optimization compels the drivers to bend space and time, eventually rendering them invisible as they reach the highest level, that of the \u201cGhost Dancer.\u201d Storm and Mo\u2019s individuality \u2014 undermined by their identical physicality, performed by a single actress \u2014\u00a0suggests capitalism\u2019s homogenizing effects, in which workers are indistinguishable and interchangeable. Their relationship, too, remains ambiguous;\u00a0it is unclear whether they are lovers or enemies, or even a hallucination of each other. Their physical proximity triggers alarms in the system, from delivery delays that result in lowered ratings to GPS glitches that disable location tracking. While drawing attention to the unnoticed labor that sustains capitalist economies, the work recasts invisibility as a mode of fugitivity \u2014 resisting capture as a pin on a GPS system, continuously recalculated for optimal route.<\/p>\n

\"\"Installation view of Ayoung Kim, \u201cDelivery Dancer\u2019s Arc: 0\u00ba Receiver\u201d (2024), three-channel video<\/p>\n

Across the hall, the next two parts \u2014\u00a0\u201cDelivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse\u201d and Delivery Dancer\u2019s Arc: 0\u00ba Receiver (both 2024) \u2014\u00a0expand the prequel\u2019s question of invisibility and fugitivity. In the latter, Storm and Mo race across open desert \u2014 initially materialized only as a trail of dust, before emerging in full form across a three-channel screen that spans two walls. In this universe, Storm and Mo fight the Timekeepers\u2019 imposition of the \u201cabsolute time,\u201d which aims to foreclose any divergence from standardized existence. A ghostly voice hums a song whose title \u2014\u00a0\u201cSong of the Sky Pacers\u201d \u2014\u00a0and lyrics borrow from an ancient Chinese poem used for celestial navigation. Together, the voiceover and the score suggest temporal measurements closely aligned with nature: the awakening of frogs, the Eastern wind thawing frozen soil, among others. Meanwhile, Mo and Storm\u2019s bodies interlock and untangle across three channels, oscillating between acts of tenderness and aggression \u2014 an embrace, for instance, quickly gives way to strangling. The indeterminacy of their relationship mirrors divergent temporalities, all of which resist capitalism\u2019s demand for standardization and optimization.<\/p>\n

In \u201cInverse,\u201d Kim introduces a vertically organized fictional world called Novaria, where deliveries move in a single direction, from underworld to upperworld. In an interview<\/a>, the artist notes how the direction of the human gaze, which was once oriented upward toward the stars as a source of navigation and wonder, now seems fixed downward toward the screen. Unfolding across three large screens suspended from the ceiling, \u201cInverse\u201d prompts its viewers to look up. Three orange-carpeted slopes run parallel to the screens; seated or reclined, viewers assume the posture of stargazing \u2014 only to find the sky fractured across three screens, even displaying different videos at times. Throughout, Storm and Mo appear in multiple stylistic formations from cartoonish renderings that harken back to 1990s animation to game-like universes with raining donuts. If \u201c0\u00ba Receiver\u201d refutes imposed singularity, \u201cInverse\u201d imagines a world where multiplicity might coexist \u2014 dispersed across folds and fissures of virtual existence.<\/p>\n

\"\"Installation view of Ayoung Kim, \u201cDelivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse\u201d (2024), three-channel video, lighting installation, random video playback and lighting synchronization control program, sundial sculpture, graphic sheets and circular screen<\/p>\n

The installations across PS1 refuse to position these universes \u2014 virtual and proliferating \u2014 as secondary or subordinate to the physical; instead, they prompt the viewers to consider these interstices as space in themselves. In fact, the fragmentary architecture of the museum\u2019s repurposed public school building sometimes renders physical installations \u2014 from helmets and sundials to prominent use of mirrors \u2014 secondary to the virtual landscapes. Displaced from the video installations that feature and contextualize them, these objects, too, occupy a space between marginalization and strategic illegibility.<\/p>\n

It is precisely through such fracture that Kim\u2019s universes evade standardization \u2014 of time, labor, identity, and desire. Throughout the trilogy, Kim references both modern and traditional methods of spatiotemporal navigation to reframe fragmentation as possibility rather than problem. Drawing on genres ranging from the sci-fi TV series \u00c6on Flux to GL (Girls\u2019 Love) anime, Kim foregrounds how technology carves out spaces for splintered desires. Even as the trilogy interrogates technology\u2019s grip on body and psyche, it mobilizes those very tools to sustain fragmented modes of being.<\/p>\n

\"\"Installation view of Ayoung Kim: Delivery Dancer Codex\"\"Installation view of Ayoung Kim, \u201cDelivery Dancer\u2019s Arc: 0\u00ba Receiver\u201d (2024), three-channel video\"\"Installation view of Ayoung Kim: Delivery Dancer Codex\"\"Installation view of Ayoung Kim, \u201cDelivery Dancer\u2019s Arc: 0\u00ba Receiver\u201d (2024), three-channel video\"\"Installation view of Ayoung Kim, \u201cGhost Dancers A\u201d (2022), helmets, video, tablets, wire, corrugated tube, and metal chain<\/p>\n

Ayoung Kim: Delivery Dancer Codex<\/a> continues at MoMA PS1 (22\u201325 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens) through March 16. The exhibition is curated by Ruba Katrib.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Art Review Her exhibition at MoMA PS1 synthesizes live-action footage, video game engines, and generative AI to create…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":222722,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-222721","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-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222721\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/222722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}