The Korean artist is one of the hottest properties worldwide right now; here are some reasons why that’s the case
It is tempting to read the success of Ayoung Kim’s work – which garnered her, among other accolades, the LG Guggenheim Award last month and the Asia Culture Center’s Future Prize the year prior – as the latest case of technophilia in contemporary art. Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse (2024), her labyrinthine mind’s most recent output, which last autumn filled the cavernous space of the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju for the exhibition that accompanied the prize, offers one compelling reason for such a rationale. Built using AI, CGI and gaming technologies, the three-channel video installation traces the fictional story of two female delivery drivers, Ernst Mo and En Storm (both anagrams of ‘monster’), first introduced in the video Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (2022), which debuted in Kim’s solo show at Seoul’s Gallery Hyundai. In that prequel, the love-hate narrative of the couriers (dubbed ‘delivery dancers’, insinuating the inevitable post-Fordist merger of labour and leisure) unfolds in a quasi-fictional Seoul, which Kim scrupulously crafts by merging actual footage of the city with computer-generated imagery to depict a world in which, as the voiceover to the video has it, time and space can be “folded and snapped”. The protagonists use the capacity to breach spatiotemporal constraints in order to respond to “emergency calls” – a seemingly vain objective that is nevertheless uncomfortably close to the reality of a postpandemic city functioning on expedited deliveries of every conceivable good from fried chicken to drying racks.
Complemented by a videogame, Delivery Dancer Simulation (2022), in which players could navigate the dancers’ version of Seoul, Delivery Dancer’s Sphere signalled that Kim’s universe will continue to grow in various shapes and formats. And so it did in the latest instalment, where Kim’s deft deployment of state-of-the-art digital tools was scaled up even further to generate highly produced, increasingly seamless visuals. In a somewhat unexpected, if not disconnected, departure from the preceding work, the two characters are reunited in the distant future in an imaginary land of Novaria, whose sprawling landscape Kim constructed by feeding game-engine visuals of the scenery to a generative AI program. This computational collaborator not only finessed the nooks and crannies of Novaria but also took on editorial tasks, reassembling the footage and deploying it across the three screens in an ongoing compilation of select sequences that renders every viewing unique. What some might perceive as an invasion into that sacred territory of artistic authorship, increasingly considered the last bastion of human agency in our automated world, seems to be, for Kim, an avenue through which to incorporate formal and conceptual potentials that are otherwise unobtainable.
Yet within that stream of optimism, Kim’s use of technology is full of nuance. For one, the wryly dystopian settings of her latest projects are the direct result of the amplification of neoliberal forces accelerated by the digital revolution. While the increase in outsourcing practices and deregulatory policies has served to normalise temporary and part-time contracts in recent years, it was the development of consumer service platforms such as Amazon and Uber that really ushered in the ‘gig economy’ era that is represented by Ernst Mo and En Storm. Perhaps this is why Kim is prudent not to overstate, if not categorically embrace, the authorial capacities of the latest scientific breakthroughs. She has emphasised in numerous interviews that game engines and generative AI are, like Photoshop, tools to realise her vision, for they inevitably require human input to produce any semblance of thought. To read Kim’s work as a wholehearted embrace of, or validating stamp on, cutting-edge technology also risks fuelling techno-orientalist preconceptions about her Asian identity – an ongoing concern, ironically enough, as the generative AI program she used churned out biased images when prompted to produce virtual models of Asian women for Delivery Dancer’s Arc.
To fully tease out the ways in which technology is configured in her practice, it helps to consider Kim’s wider artistic trajectory. Her earlier projects sought to reassemble existing narratives of varying scales into performances and installations in order to construct alternative, peripheral histories. The series Zepheth, Whale Oil from the Hanging Gardens to You (2014–15), for example, reconstructs the layered accounts of the impact of petroleum on postwar Korea, mixing landmark events such as the 1970s energy crises alongside personal memories of Kim’s own father, who was dispatched to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as part of a migrant workforce that helped build those countries’ basic infrastructure during the 1980s. Here, too, the artist employed a rudimentary algorithm as a means to subvert manmade history, using it to fracture and randomise the corpus of original texts compiled during her research and pen a libretto that was juxtaposed with another bearing lyrics of her own making – all of which culminated in a live performance and a sound installation. But Kim’s predilection for the machinic has been more compellingly integrated into her practice since she ventured into the realm of speculative fiction. Her single-channel video Porosity Valley, Portable Holes (2017) is one such example: its protagonist, Petra Genetrix, is a sentient crystalline entity who is displaced to a different ‘rock platform’ due to an explosion in her hometown of Porosity Valley. What helped Kim render this plotline, though admittedly bare-bones and loose, was computer-generated imagery, 3D-modelling technology and greenscreen video. Even if its somewhat botched aesthetics does not quite translate as a visualisation of an advanced parallel universe – unlike, say, Black Mirror (2011–) or Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) – the video is convincing as it brings into relief the very mechanisms of production that would bring us closer to the future it depicts.
By employing technology as a means to realise her speculative narratives, Kim refuses neatly to circumscribe and carve it out as an object of debate. Her position seems to be rooted in the fact that it has become an ‘extension of man’ for many, just as the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan predicted more than half a century ago. Now, she suggests, the standard injunction of technological apparatuses as threat, which has been espoused by so many artists and thinkers alike even until recently, cannot be so easily defended. If artists in the vein of Hito Steyerl used art to tease out technology’s troubling potentials – from surveillance and warfare to the falsification of truth – Kim’s practice instead asks how its powers can be proactively harnessed to construct futures as we imagine them. In a world that is only becoming stranger than the most far-fetched novels and where fiction is becoming fact with greater rapidity, Kim’s ludic vision may already be congealing into a tangible something in one rickety corner of this earthly sphere.
Ayoung Kim’s work is on view in Ayoung Kim: Many Worlds Over, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, through 20 July and in the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, through 27 April. All three Delivery Dancer works will be on view in Ayoung Kim, MoMA PS1, New York, 6 November – 16 March.
Harry C. H. Choi is a PhD candidate in art history and film and media studies at Stanford University
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