In Ayoung Kim’s Futuristic Videos, Women Delivery Drivers Are Action Heroes

A courier zooms through the heavy traffic of Seoul on a motorcycle, cold gray-blue streets flashing by. Armored in a shiny helmet and head-to-toe gray, the driver speeds from delivery to delivery, always trying to beat the clock for the latest task flashing on her app.

Such urgency is a defining feature of contemporary urban life, epitomized by the “frictionless” on-demand deliveries made possible by apps. Almost anything we want is at our fingertips, delivered by a vast network of anonymous figures who move through the streets, picking up and dropping off the items we desire. These forgotten couriers are the protagonists for video artist Ayoung Kim, who has received huge acclaim for her fast-paced, tech-influenced video works over the last several years. In the “Delivery Dancer” body of work, Seoul’s women delivery drivers embody the technological anxieties of our time.

In 2023, Kim received the inaugural Asian Cultural Center (ACC) Future Prize at Frieze London, leading to a major show at the institution, located in Gwangju, South Korea. This year has seen her rise to even greater heights. Last month, she received the $100,000 LG Guggenheim Award, which recognizes artists working with technology. In November, she will have a major moment in New York with the debut of a new work for the prestigious performance art festival Performa and a solo show at MoMA PS1. Meanwhile, Kim’s exhibition “Many Worlds Over” is on view at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin through July 20th, drawing together video works with sculptures and interactive video games.

Kim showed all the excitement of a curious and thoughtful creator during a walkthrough of her exhibition. She described both highbrow and lowbrow obsessions, speaking about “ethnofuturism” (sci-fi with a non-Western perspective) and the 1990s anime series Aeon Flux with equivalent seriousness.

These inspirations are immediately evident in her work. The earliest piece included in the exhibition, Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (2022), portrays Ernst Mo, a female delivery driver (or “dancer,” in the parlance of her futuristic Uber-style app). Mo races against the rules of time and space, which, in this fictional version of Seoul, can sometimes be broken. Rendered in both CGI and live-action, the character zips through glitchy video game locales as well as high-rises, back alleys, and highways. Again and again, she crosses paths with En Storm, a version of herself from an alternate reality. The characters’ stories become entangled; their passionate relationship switching between romance and rivalry, a bond suggested by their anagrammed names and the single actress who plays both. “It’s tragic because they don’t have time to be together; they just chase each other,” Kim said of this Inception-style narrative of interlocking destinies and collapsing realities.

The artist’s current practice is a turn away from her original career path. Raised in Seoul, she worked as a motion graphics designer until the age of 26, when she moved to the U.K. to study photography. During her time at London College of Communication, Kim said in an interview, she discovered her interest in the philosophy behind image making, and went on to earn her MA in fine art at Chelsea College of Art in 2010.

After residencies in Paris and Berlin, she returned to Seoul as a full-time artist. Over her career, she has focused on speculative, narrative-driven works, like Zepheth, Whale Oil From the Hanging Gardens to You, Shell 3 (2015)—a sound-focused installation shown at the 2015 Venice Biennale that explored the Middle East petroleum industry and its connection to Korea’s prospering economy. Represented by Gallery Hyundai, she now works with five studio managers who help bring her CGI-driven visions to life.

It was the massive boom in delivery app use during COVID that sparked the idea for the “Delivery Dancer” series. “In Korea, during the pandemic, these platforms were really at their height—and I was their most dutiful customer, ordering sometimes twice a day,” Kim said. Realizing that many of those bringing her noodles and pizza were women, she became fascinated by their community of couriers. She organized a ride-along with a skilful biker to inform how she gamed the apps’ incentives and traffic systems. “This experience really opened my mind to write the script,” Kim said. “This algorithm always urges your body to be optimal, to be faster. Optimization is very important on the platform.”

But optimization has a dark side. The speculative world Kim has created is a means to discuss “technoprecarity,” a term coined by a group of scholars at the University of Michigan to describe “the premature exposure to death and debility that working with or being subjected to digital technologies accelerates.” For Kim, Korea is a foremost example of this phenomenon: “Everything is produced under the conditions of extreme competition,” she said. “This ‘survival game mode’ is embedded in all Korean people in all sectors of society…I wanted to call out this competition.”

Meanwhile, Korean culture has seen a surge in international interest in recent years. K-pop has broken through on global music charts, and Korean literature is gaining popularity and attention in the West, while the country’s art market becomes highly watched. Kim herself has benefited from this international interest: “Of course I’m indebted to the ‘K-culture’ industry. It’s enchanted everyone and benefited my artworks—it’s good to be attractive!” she said. “But still I have ambivalent feelings about that.”

Kim’s strategy for discussing the contemporary world is rooted in speculative fiction, inspired by novelists like Octavia Butler. She is also influenced, she said, by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who is known for his conception of life as a series of mazes. “I really wanted to make a conceptual labyrinth,” she said. Kim’s characters often weave through narrow, similar-looking passageways and M.C. Escher–esque architecture. The exhibition design of “Many Worlds Over,” too, creates a kind of labyrinth: The bright blue rooms are laid out in intentionally confusing ways, with floor-to-ceiling mirrors creating the illusion of new spaces and paths.

Perhaps the most exciting work in the show is Kim’s most recent, Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0° Receiver (2024), a 30-minute, three-channel video. The film extends the narrative universe of Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, with Ernst Mo and En Storm this time playing spies for a secret cadre of timekeepers. They flit between possible worlds, on the run through ancient architectural ruins and their gloomy, fictionalized Seoul. “It’s getting a little bit confusing,” Kim said, smiling, while explaining the dense plot. “Sometimes my studio manager complains that I’m a maximalist!”

The film’s sharp editing and CGI action sequences are nonetheless dazzling, building on how Kim saw Delivery Dancer’s Sphere being received. “I was fascinated by the European reaction—people thought it was an action movie, and I thought ‘this is amazing,’” she said. “Especially with the female characters [being] so heroic—I wanted to extend that.” Receiver, for example, has several slow-motion martial arts combat scenes, as well as a Mission Impossible–esque motorcycle driving off a cliff.