한국국제교류재단

How does Kim interpret speculative fiction in her practice? The clearest articulation is found in her “Delivery Dancer” series, including “Delivery Dancer’s Sphere” and “Delivery Dancer Simulation” from 2022, and “Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0˚ Receiver” and “Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse” from 2024. The idea for this series first arose during the COVID-19 pandemic, when ordering meals online became routine and the people who delivered them were no longer seen, as Korea switched to contactless delivery. Who were these couriers gliding anonymously through the streets?

Kim’s speculation always begins with a question. Rooted in extensive research, her thought process is less about fantasy than an exercise in analytical imagination — an experiment in which formulated realities are reconfigured into alternate systems. It’s like watching an apple fall, deriving the law of gravity, and then using that formula to calculate where a baseball might land. The process can even go further, altering the formula’s constants to visualize the gravitational pull of Mars or the Moon.

In this world, Kim created a female rider named Ernst Mo — an anagram of “monster” — and redefined the act of delivering as “dancing.” Then she asked: “What would happen to a ‘delivery dancer’ — someone racing at the speed of light to complete a delivery — in a world where all pedestrians have disappeared?”

To reach such velocity, Ernst Mo must travel through folded or severed layers of space invisible to others. Within those warped dimensions, she crosses into another universe and meets her double, En Storm, at a “leakage point.” When the two collide, time slows — an echo of Einstein’s relativity — and Ernst Mo, unable to complete her deliveries, sees her ratings fall until no new orders arrive.

This narrative unfolds like a passacaglia, evolving through repetition and transformation with each variation. In “Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse,” Ernst Mo and En Storm deliver artifacts containing vanishing notions of past time in the fictional city of Novaria, questioning the established time system of 24 hours and 365 days. In “Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0˚ Receiver,” the two become reclaimers of time, journeying through deserts, cities, and dimensions while pursued by “time keepers” from the future. The series continues to expand across animation, live-action film, and performance, envisioning a world where Ernst Mo and En Storm may one day coexist without conflict.

“Delivery Dancer’s Sphere” addresses the issues of platform labor, which surged to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic. The work has been praised for articulating the artist’s thematic concerns through a combination of digital technology and complex storytelling.
Courtesy of the artist

“Porosity Valley” is another series that explores variations on the narrative. The title of the work “Porosity Valley, Portable Holes” (2017) refers to a place riddled with plot holes where improbable stories take form. Its protagonist, Petra Genetrix, a quasi-mythical entity composed of mineral and data bits inside a massive crystalline rock formation, faces a bewildering existential problem when the valley collapses and they must migrate to another data platform.

In the sequel, “Porosity Valley 2: Tricksters’ Plot” (2019), Petra Genetrix awakens on the shore of Crypto Valley, is captured by immigration authorities, treated as a virus, and confined inside a “smart grid.” Haunted by hallucinations and auditory distortions, they escape into a cave and fuse with Mother Rock, a transcendent being. These allegorical tales prompt viewers to reflect on migration, refugees, nationhood, and the origins of borders.

In November 2025, Ayoung Kim presented her new performance “Body^n” at Performa Biennial 2025 in Canyon, New York City, shown here in a production still. The piece explores the concept of the doppelganger and the complexities of bodily representation. Movements by action and martial arts choreographer Kim Cha-i — who won an Emmy for Squid Game together with three other stunt performers — were digitized through real-time live motion capture.
Courtesy of the artist

Oil is another subject that undergoes a striking transformation in Ayoung Kim’s work — viscous, historical, and deeply personal. It also anchors her long-term research projects, which intersect with her speculative fiction.

Kim’s fascination with oil stems from her family history. In 1979, three months after her birth, Kim’s father, then a manager at Hanyang Construction, was dispatched to Kuwait. He returned in 1982, left again for Saudi Arabia in 1984, and only came back in 1991 during the Gulf War. Kim remembers the longing she felt for her father, who spent long stretches abroad and was able to visit Korea just twice a year, and the thrill of the unfamiliar goods he brought home from distant lands.

Years later, Kim realized that her father’s journey mirrored Korea’s national trajectory. In 1979, OPEC producers sharply raised prices as global oil supplies tightened, triggering the second oil crisis. Under a government-led initiative to secure oil capital through the export of labor and technology, Korean construction companies entered the Middle East to support economic growth amid the oil crisis. The intersection of this macro-history of oil capital and her own micro-history as a child became the seed of a major research project — the “Zepheth” series.

The first work in the series, “Zepheth, Whale Oil from the Hanging Gardens to You, Shell,” takes its title from an archaic term for bitumen, an early form of petroleum. In this profoundly complex work, Kim wrote a script based on extensive research into oil and the Middle East, then built a computing device that regenerated the script using logical yet chaotic rules. She called this device “Deus ex machina” — god from the machine. Feeding her original Libretto A script into the device, she obtained an algorithmic Libretto B that fragmented and recomposed her words. She then paired Libretto B with music by a human composer and Libretto A with the machine’s erratic notes, combining them in a 12-person polyphonic choral performance.

Her recent video work “Al-Mather Plot 1991” (2025) distills this expansive research project on petroleum. Revisiting the Al-Mather apartments in Riyadh — one of Saudi Arabia’s first large-scale residential complexes, built between 1979 and 1981 by her father’s company — Kim examines how the global formation and circulation of oil capital have shaped people’s lives. Through on-site visits, interviews, and stories about the luxury housing complex as told by its residents, she combines new technologies like generative AI, CGI, and lidar scanning to create a futuristic essay film where macro- and micro-histories converge.

Kim’s earliest works were photomontages. Later reflecting on her artistic shift, she once said in an interview, “Ayoung Kim: Synthetic Storyteller,” that she had begun to think of the term “synthesis,” a broader concept that includes montage, not as a seamless union but as one that exposes all its rough and crooked seams.

Her blending of reality and fiction is in itself cyborg-like. At the opening of her 2025 solo exhibition Plot, Blop, Plop at Atelier Hermes in Seoul, she remarked, “From now on, I plan to work on two tracks — speculative fiction such as ‘Delivery Dancer’ and research-based projects.” If “Delivery Dancer” casts off the verisimilitude of reality to expose its mechanisms, her research projects restore human texture through verifiable interpretation. Together, they reveal Ayoung Kim as a synthetic storyteller — a cyborg with a prosthetic arm, an Asian futurist figure wielding a powerful mechanical limb.

“Al-Mather Plot 1991” is set in the Al-Mather Housing Complex, one of Saudi Arabia’s first large-scale apartment developments. Blending personal experience with modern and contemporary history, the video artwork weaves multilayered narratives around economic growth and geopolitical conflict brought about by oil. It was unveiled at Kim’s 2025 solo exhibition Plot, Blop, Plop at Atelier Hermes in Seoul.
Courtesy of the artist