South Korean video artist Ayoung Kim is making a significant impact on New York's art scene this November with her first solo exhibition in the United States at MoMA PS1 and a groundbreaking motion-capture performance at the Performa festival. The 46-year-old Seoul-based artist has gained international recognition for her complex video installations that explore themes of labor, capitalism, and technology's impact on contemporary society.
Kim's breakthrough work, "Delivery Dancers Sphere" (2022), has become one of the most compelling artistic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic era. Unlike typical pandemic-themed art focusing on isolation, this video examines the experiences of essential workers who continued working while most people stayed home. The work follows two female delivery workers navigating Seoul on white motorcycles, blending documentary footage with anime-style animation, AI-generated imagery, and gaming engine technology.
To create authentic content, Kim embedded herself with real delivery workers during the pandemic. "I 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," Kim explained from her Seoul studio. "So, I asked her to bring me. It was really liberating, being able to visit so many strange and unknown, hidden places that I've never been, even though I'm so familiar with the city."
The artist's research revealed how workers navigate daily life through employer apps, following digital maps and constantly managing customer calls. "Almost 99 percent of contemporary people are the techno-precariat," Kim said, referring to a class made unstable by digital technology. "We don't know what's actually going on behind big tech companies' regimes. I'm curious about their reshaping of our understanding of time and temporality."
Kim's international profile has surged recently, with major institutions acquiring and exhibiting her work. The Tate in London acquired "Delivery Dancers Sphere" from Frieze London in 2023, and the video has since been shown at multiple venues, including on the facade of the M museum in Hong Kong and at Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof museum. Her recent recognition includes winning the $100,000 LG Guggenheim Award.
Defne Ayas, curator of Kim's Performa commission, praised the artist's innovative approach. "Many people work with AI, many people work with data, but she's going a few steps further," Ayas said. "I think the art world really has been waiting for somebody like her." Ayas jokingly called Kim "our prophetess" for her visionary work.
The success has required Kim to expand her operation significantly. Previously working largely alone, she now employs five full-time studio managers, with two specializing in gaming engines and technology, while three others manage her growing network of collaborators and exhibition commitments.
Kim's artistic influences span various media forms, from the 1990s MTV animated series "Æon Flux" to contemporary anime genres like GL (Girls Love), which focuses on female relationships with erotic undertones. She describes being fascinated by "female-to-female antagonism, love and romance, emotional things that are entangled." Despite her work being shown at film festivals, she notes that "according to the dutiful, authoritative dogma, my work is not seen as cinema."
Her filmmaking approach combines traditional techniques with experimental editing. Kim writes extensive shot lists and storyboards like conventional filmmakers, explaining every sequence in dense detail for her production team. However, she significantly alters plots during editing, making them "more labyrinthine in the end." She cites influences including Alain Resnais's modernist masterpiece "Last Year at Marienbad" (1961) and works by acclaimed Korean director Hong Sang-soo.
Born in Seoul in 1979, Kim initially studied graphic design at Kookmin University before moving to the UK during her twenties, which she describes as "a very hard time in my life." She studied photography at the London College of Communication, where she engaged with postcolonial academic discourse. This experience made her aware of her status as an Asian woman abroad and led her to reassess Hollywood science fiction films like "Blade Runner" (1982).
"In many of these works, no Asian entities have their own agency," Kim observed. This realization prompted her to ask: "What could be [a form of] agency-retaining, somehow thinking about our future?" Initially, she explored historical subjects, including her series "PH Express" (2011-12) about British occupation of Korean islands and "Zepheth, Whale Oil from the Hanging Gardens to You" (2014-15), which meditated on Saudi Arabia's 1980s oil industry where her father worked as a migrant laborer.
These historical works gained attention from major curators like Okwui Enwezor, who included a piece from the Zepheth series in the 2015 Venice Biennale. However, around 2016, after reading speculative science fiction by Octavia Butler and Donna Haraway, Kim shifted her focus. "I realized, Oh, my God, you can't research that much! You're not a historian, and you're not rebuilding history. An artist's role is not writing history again."
Since then, Kim's work has taken on a distinctly futuristic quality. Her latest project for the forthcoming Powerhouse Parramatta museum in Sydney envisions a gleaming mall with Baroque and Neoclassical elements hosting a "Dancer of the Year" contest. Kim describes it as "really an action movie" and showed renderings of impossibly large glass and metal towers that appear to be from 2125 rather than 2025.
Ruba Katrib, curator of Kim's MoMA PS1 exhibition, explains that the artist "deliberately constructs an unusual continuum between past, present, and future." Katrib describes Kim's work as creating "this nonlinear time, where you're stuck in this loop. Her characters are trying to escape the loop, but they can't, really. Maybe they don't want to escape."
The upcoming Performa piece, titled "Bodyn.," will feature live performers including Kim Chai, a stunt performer from Netflix's "Squid Game." Using motion-capture technology, performers' movements will be transported to digital landscapes displayed on screens. Ayas noted the intimate nature of the performers' movements, asking Kim: "Should we turn the lights off here, to make sure their love is expressed?"
Kim acknowledges the romantic elements in her Delivery Dancer works, explaining that the characters enact a form of courtship. "Their love stories will never be fulfilled in the entire universe," she said, "because somehow, they meet and part and meet and part again and again, as the worlds reset and the stories restart again and again. It's their destiny." This endless cycle of connection and separation reflects broader themes about modern existence under digital capitalism that run throughout Kim's evolving body of work.
