InterviewAyoung Kim and art of speculative world-building in AI era

Ayoung Kim, the artist behind the much-celebrated "Delivery Dancer" series / Courtesy of Fondation d'entreprise Hermes

At first glance, it’s easy to cast Ayoung Kim as a quintessential digital trailblazer, her practice seemingly rooted on the frontier of tech-driven art.

After all, her much-acclaimed “Delivery Dancer” series draws on generative artificial intelligence (AI), motion capture and game engines to conjure a futuristic, labyrinthine Seoul — a cityscape where female delivery workers navigate the hyper-demanding gig economy, their every move governed by master algorithms. In this high-octane world, space and time can be, quite literally, “snapped and folded” to maximize efficiency. And as the narrative unfolds across three video installments, it eventually extends into a distant future, set within a vast terrain called Novaria.

It’s this audacious vision that made her the first Korean artist to win the Golden Nica at the 2023 Prix Ars Electronica, followed by the inaugural ACC Future Prize and, most recently, the $100,000 LG Guggenheim Award. To celebrate her achievement, LG is screening Kim’s “Delivery Dancer” series on its electronic billboard in New York’s Times Square until May 25.

A scene from Ayoung Kim's "Delivery Dancer's Arc: Inverse" (2024) / Courtesy of the artist and Asia Culture Center

Installation view of "ACC Future Prize 2024: Ayoung Kim, 'Delivery Dancer's Arc: Inverse'" at the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju / Courtesy of the artist and Asia Culture Center

But to define her work solely by its digital prowess is to merely scratch the surface of her two-decade-long oeuvre.

In fact, Kim herself describes her process as one of “chaotic collisions,” where emerging technologies meet the most analog of methods — days spent poring over centuries-old archives, field research notes endlessly scribbled on-site and long, winding conversations with locals. It’s through this idiosyncratic convergence that she constructs her epic worlds, often stretching real-world narratives into realms of the virtual, the speculative and the fantastical.

Take, for instance, “Al-Mather Plot 1991,” her latest work currently on view at Seoul’s Atelier Hermes.

A scene from Ayoung Kim's "Al-Mather Plot 1991" (2025) / Courtesy of the artist and Fondation d'entreprise Hermes

This 28-minute video, a visual reinterpretation of her sound installation series “Zepheth, Whale Oil from the Hanging Gardens to You” from a decade ago, stems from Kim’s exhaustive fieldwork and archival research into petroleum’s relationship with Korea’s postwar economy.

Here, she threads together watershed events — from the oil shocks of the 1970s to the eruption of the 1990 Gulf War — with personal memories of her father, one of many Korean migrant workers dispatched to the Middle East throughout the 1980s to help lay the foundations of the region’s urban infrastructure.

At the heart of the work lies the Al-Mather Housing Complex in Riyadh. Commissioned by the Saudi government and built by her father’s employer, Hanyang Corporation, in the 1980s, the complex stood vacant upon completion until the Gulf War, when it became a refuge for Kuwaitis fleeing the conflict. After the war, it was repurposed once more, this time into luxury apartments for local residents. Because of its layered past, the building remains a living palimpsest: still known as “Hanyang Apartment” among Korean expats and “Askaan Kuwaiti” to those who once sought shelter there.

What makes “Al-Mather Plot 1991” particularly striking is how Kim deploys technology not simply to recount such history, but to fracture, reenact and reimagine it. Through a hybrid language of live-action footage, image-generating AI and game engine animation, she collapses the boundaries between documentary and dreamscape, between fact and embodied memory.

A scene from Ayoung Kim's "Al-Mather Plot 1991" (2025) / Courtesy of the artist and Fondation d'entreprise Hermes

Archival photographs and field recordings gathered during her research are spliced and digitally reassembled — so fantastically, at times, that they slip into the register of fiction, as if history itself were being remembered through a dreamlike lens. The Al-Mather complex, too — its floor plans, facades and the voices of those who inhabit it — is reconstructed through game engines and AI, becoming an architecture suspended between reality, simulation and memory.

“There was a time when I thought I needed to bury myself in fact-finding, to pore over every possible source in order to move my story forward,” Kim told The Korea Times in a recent video interview. “But I came to realize that even when something is grounded in facts, the act of reconstruction ultimately belongs to the artist.”

“With this project, too, I began with facts: my father’s journals, interviews with those involved, personal testimonies. But alongside that was this hazy, almost mythical vision of the Middle East I carried as a child — a place I could only fantasize about through my father’s stories. I wove that imagined vision into live-action footage with the help of generative AI. In that sense, this work is about my own fiction-making as well.”

This, in many ways, is the crux of Kim’s path-breaking practice. Cutting-edge technology, for her, isn’t just a display of technical mastery; it’s a tool for speculative world-building — one that is always anchored in the weight of real histories and the urgent questions of our time, from neoliberal capital and postcolonial labor to biopolitics.

Installation view of Ayoung Kim's solo exhibition "Plot, Blob, Plop" at Atelier Hermes in southern Seoul, where her video installation "Al-Mather Plot 1991" (2025) is on view / Courtesy of Fondation d'entreprise Hermes

Asian futurism vs. techno-orientalism

Such a creative direction is partly shaped by Kim’s earlier encounter with science and speculative fiction, particularly works animated by Afrofuturist imagination.

“What struck me about Afrofuturism was its ability to articulate the precarious realities and the heavy weight of historical discrimination that Black communities have endured — not through reportage or realism, but through the language of science fiction. It showed me a powerful kind of artistic freedom: the potential to reframe ethnic identity and lived reality through imagined futures,” she said.

The artist also became drawn to the broader currents of ethnofuturism, which have emerged across many cultures, from the Gulf region and Southeast Asia to Polynesia. What these movements share is the experience of a modernization that wasn’t achieved autonomously but under the disruptive influence of Western colonialism. In response, these regions have developed their own futuristic, fantastical stories to reassert cultural agency.

Such revelations became a catalyst for Kim to chart her own course, adopting the speculative vocabulary of Asian futurism.

A scene from Ayoung Kim's "Delivery Dancer's Sphere" (2022) / Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Hyundai

A scene from Ayoung Kim's "Delivery Dancer's Sphere" (2022) / Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Hyundai

For her, Asian futurism stands in sharp contrast to the techno-orientalism long embedded in Western pop culture, where Asia appears as a hyper-technological and exoticized backdrop, while Asian figures themselves are conspicuously absent. In these visions — think “Blade Runner” or “Cloud Atlas” — Asia becomes little more than a glitzy stage for white protagonists, a landscape stripped of its own voice.

Through the lens of Asian futurism — and vividly across Kim’s state-of-the-art digital worlds — Asian subjects step forward as protagonists in their own right. They are the ones who traverse, question and reimagine their futures, grappling with issues that, while rooted in particular histories, resonate with a universal urgency.

A scene from Ayoung Kim's "Delivery Dancer's Arc: 0° Receiver" (2024) / Courtesy of the artist and ACMI

Humans as ‘caregivers’ for AI

To realize her visions, one of the tools Kim increasingly turns to is generative AI. In her recent installments of the “Delivery Dancer” series, and to some extent, in “Al-Mather Plot 1991,” AI became a collaborator, helping to render, remix and edit live-action footage and game-engine visuals to breathe life into her virtual worlds.

Working with AI models, however, was far from a seamless process. She stressed that humans inevitably take on the role of “caregivers.”

“Current AI systems don’t behave predictably, at least not in the ways we envision,” she said. “Even when we kept feeding them detailed prompts, the outputs often veered far from our creative goals. So many had to be discarded.”

One telling example: when she tried to create the virtual bodies of her Asian female protagonists in “Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse,” the image-generating program continued producing biased, stereotypical visuals.

To maintain the project’s consistent visual identity, her team ultimately had to manually fine-tune and build large parts of the world themselves using game engines.

A scene from Ayoung Kim's "Delivery Dancer's Arc: 0° Receiver" (2024) / Courtesy of the artist and ACMI

“Generative AI today is still very much in its infancy. It doesn’t yet fully comprehend human language or intentions, so we have to adapt to its logic, gently coaxing it toward understanding,” she noted. “It’s an endless process of trial, feedback and patience — almost like tending to a crying child.”

Kim’s stance toward emerging technology is neither one of blind technophilia nor outright rejection. Rather, she asks how humans might actively use its unexplored powers to shape the futures they want to inhabit.

“With AI, its instrumental value depends entirely on how we choose to engage with it,” she said.

“Technology isn’t something fixed; it exists in a state of fluid malleability. That’s why I believe it’s essential for us to keep assigning value to new technologies — by using them, offering them feedback and expanding their capacities in meaningful ways like world-building. That’s how we can guide their evolution — and perhaps prevent them from becoming something dangerous.”

With such a philosophy in hand, 2025 is shaping up to be a banner year for the artist. In addition to ongoing solo exhibitions at Seoul’s Atelier Hermes and Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof museum, Kim is set to unveil a new facade commission for Hong Kong’s M+ in October, followed by her major U.S. solo debut at MoMA PS1 in New York this November.