Many Worlds Over
During the pandemic, artist Ayoung Kim was confined to her studio and had to rely on delivery apps for her groceries. In addition to her daily meals, this experience provided plenty of food for thought. In 2022, her ruminations culminated in an installation entitled Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, which won the ACC Future Prize. Her follow-up installation is called Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse. In this interview, Ayoung recounts her creative journey to date.
Hello! Why don’t you start by introducing yourself.
My name is Ayoung Kim, and I’m a new media artist. I create fictional worlds using various new media.
Can you tell the “uninitiated” about the world you created in Delivery Dancer?
Delivery Dancer is a cycle of works I started in 2022. The latest additions to the cycle are Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse, which was shown at the ACC, and Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0° Receiver, which was commissioned by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). The very first work in the cycle, Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, is a single-channel video installation about a fictional courier for a food delivery app called “Delivery Dancer” in an imaginary future Seoul. It’s the upshot of questions I pondered while confined to my studio during the pandemic and ordering food on delivery apps daily.
At the time, I thought to myself: “These drivers race across the deserted city to drop off some food, then immediately take off again to deliver the next order. They have no interaction with us and remain anonymous, doing invisible work.” I wondered where these people were coming from and where they were going, and these questions became the starting point for my project. I researched the platform-based gig economy of invisible or “ghost” work increasingly controlled by algorithms. The research helped me understand a wide range of phenomena in present-day society.
In Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, I sought to fold and intertwine space and time to create a labyrinth. After completing the project in 2022, I received very positive feedback –and the ACC Future Prize. So I followed it up with Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse, set in a new, underground world called Novaria, in which ancient and modern calendars collide. It’s a story about resistance, with two protagonists striving to restore the ancient world’s conception of time and cosmology.
You mentioned using generative AI for the first time in your 2024 installations Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse and Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0° Receiver. As an artist, how do you view technological development and the use of new technologies?
In every era, new technologies give rise to new discourse and art forms, which I find fascinating. I’ve conducted extensive research on how deeply we can actually communicate with generative AI and discovered a number of intriguing aspects. For one thing, I’ve come to realize that understanding the grammar of a generative AI model is essential for effective communication. It’s clear to me that AI is merely a tool and cannot develop a will of its own. It still lacks the feelings, the experience of pain, that’s necessary for creative processes.
At present, AI is incapable of carrying out a creative process by itself for a human target audience. AI-generated works don’t mean anything unless humans recognize their value. Then again, this is only true if humans are the target group. If we ever reach a point where AIs value one another’s works, we’ll have entered a realm beyond human consciousness.
Everyone who has worked with AI agrees that understanding its grammar is crucial. I found that very interesting. It involves asking a question, receiving an unexpected result and then repeatedly refining and readjusting the question. I call this process “care work.” It’s like communicating with a child that can’t express itself clearly yet and constantly trying to understand what the child is trying to say by means of different approaches.
New technologies are emerging every day, and soon it will be hard to imagine the world without them. In my view, contemporary art and culture can set themselves apart from developments in business and industry by distorting or reconstructing these technologies. This is how art has always survived. Which is why artists today need to keep developing not only their technology skills, but also their technological “literacy,” even if it’s an exhausting ongoing process.
If they don’t, technology will become increasingly incomprehensible and mystifying. More and more realms of our technologically advanced society are turning into black boxes. The algorithms used by big tech companies in particular are so complex and such a closely guarded secret that it’s almost impossible to figure out how they work. That’s why I believe endeavors to understand the mechanisms of generative AI, whatever form such efforts may take, are absolutely essential today.
You seem to like fantasy and science fiction, as well as combinations of the two. What appeals to you about these genres?
After completing my studies in the UK, I participated in a residency program in Germany, in which I developed a keen awareness of modernization processes in Europe and Korea. At the time, I had already been working on studies of modernity in Korea, which involved delving deeply into historical materials. At first, I created fictional worlds based on historical facts, but I came up against limitations when experimenting with aesthetic autonomy. Dealing with historical events made me cautious, so I wondered how I could express aesthetic autonomy more freely. At the time – that was around 2017 – I was heavily influenced by fantasy literature.
I was drawn to Afrofuturism, especially the writings of Octavia Butler, as well as science fiction by female and queer writers or featuring minorities. I particularly admire Djuna, a Korean sci-fi writer, whom I consider a national treasure. These authors led me to the realization that sci-fi novels about minorities are not just amusing experiments: they use fantasy and science fiction as political and aesthetic angles from which to perceive reality in new ways. This realization inspired me to maintain my problem-conscious view of the world while developing my aesthetic autonomy. I began freely inventing fictional works as a result.
You have a pronounced talent for using virtual imagination to shed light on real-life problems relating to migration, women and refugees. What themes and forms can be found in your Many Worlds Over exhibition at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart since February 2025?
(Ayoung shows a simulation of the exhibition space)
Many Worlds Over showcases a significant portion of my Delivery Dancer series in all five rooms on the first floor of the museum. The title was the upshot of in-depth discussions with the exhibition's curators, Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, as well as the curator Charlotte Knaup. My works are inspired by the theory of possible worlds. While each exhibit functions as a self-contained world, each of them could also be a different version of one and the same world. I sought to create environments in which, as you move through the exhibition, you continually wonder whether you’re in the same space at a different time or encountering a future version of yourself. This experience of déjà vu in subtly shifting worlds is why we settled on the title “Many Worlds Over.”
When you enter the exhibition, you see yourself reflected doubly or triply in countless mirrors, which produce an optical illusion. The two female protagonists of Delivery Dancer’s Arc, Ernst Mo and En Storm, look identical, which also serves to create a sense of duality. I used industrial frame modules to design a space resembling a shipping warehouse, a labyrinthine structure in which time and space intertwine. The exhibition features various media, starting with the video from Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, the first installment of the Delivery Dancer series. It includes derivative installations like the Orbit Dance Series, as well as a game called Stipulation, and concludes with my latest work, a three-channel video installation called Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0° Receiver.
Has this approach expanded the genre from a matter of merely “seeing” to “experiencing”? It also sounds like quite a big exhibition…
Yes, that’s right. The audiovisual experience is quite diverse, including installations and sculptures as well as works using mannequins. Fortunately, the shipping of the exhibits and the preparations for the show went smoothly. Hamburger Bahnhof put out a specially designed catalog for the show. It’s very lightweight, which makes it easy to carry around, and very reasonably priced.
In this digital age, it seems rather unusual for information to be found not on our cell phones but on the printed sheets of a catalog, thereby extending the experience to the space outside the museum. Does the catalog contain any special content?
When planning the exhibition, Sam Bardaouil found the role of Korean webtoon subculture in my work particularly fascinating. The curators showed great interest in webtoons, which are a significant part of my work, but still relatively unknown in Germany. They were especially intrigued by “GL” – which is short for “Girls’ Love” –, a subgenre focusing on queer relationships between women. My work is heavily influenced by webtoons and web novels, so I understood their curiosity. In the wallpaper installation Evening Peak Time Is Back, I used characters developed in collaboration with webtoon artist 1172 based on the GL webtoon style. As a long-time fan of this genre, I wanted to amplify the voices of queer women.
So the catalog includes excerpts from two GL webtoon works: Kill Switch by 1172 and Haegu (Sea Trench) by cosmos, both of which are intended for adult viewers. In consultation with the artists, we selected and edited images for the layout. These works appear repeatedly on full-page spreads in the catalog. Since the term “GL” isn’t widely used in Europe, the curators found this genre particularly interesting and felt a strong need to showcase it.
Was there a particular reason for this exhibition to be held at Hamburger Bahnhof?
Before going into this question, I want to take this opportunity to express my gratitude for the invitation to show my work. My one-year residency at Berlin’s Künstlerhaus Betanien in 2011 was a truly happy and instructive time for me. It greatly influenced my development as an artist, and my interaction with other artists there led to many synergies. That experience holds a special place in my memories of my youth.
Hamburger Bahnhof was my favorite art museum at the time. It’s the epicenter of contemporary art, and everyone dreams of having an exhibition there. Early last year, I suddenly found myself wondering what it would be like to have a solo show at Hamburger Bahnhof one day. That was my dream, so when Sam Bardaouil contacted me just a few months later, I was surprised and delighted by the news.
It’s like something out of a movie!
I feel incredibly grateful. Having a solo exhibition in a German national museum is a milestone for me, given my current stage of development as an artist, and I have high hopes that it will be a turning point in my artistic career, opening up new opportunities for me
Were there any unusual challenges involved in putting together the exhibition?
It involved curating existing works in a new context, so I was very excited about seeing how the curators would combine them. We had lots of brainstorming sessions. The fact that the exhibition was spread across five rooms was a special challenge. My previous exhibitions have either been held in one large room or solo shows focused on a single project. This was my first solo exhibition consisting of multiple works. The curators proposed various solutions, and I was impressed by their sense of scenography, spatial design and wayfinding.
I was also really impressed by how the exhibition incorporated concepts like meeting your own clone, exploring infinite possible worlds and the possibility of multiple timelines. It was a pleasure to see that my work could be exhibited in this way.
What should exhibitiongoers look out for in particular?
The exhibition is like a labyrinth, constantly overlapping and expanding into different corners. Exhibitiongoers will find themselves repeatedly encountering another self from another world. I hope they’ll be willing to let go, to lose themselves in the labyrinth and imagine countless possible worlds. This exhibition mirrors the world we live in today, in which technology permeates every aspect of our lives. I wanted to suggest a new way of thinking about the present through the prism of fantasy fiction.
What’s next for you after the Hamburger Bahnhof exhibition?
My next exhibition will be a solo show at Atelier Hermès in Seoul, starting in late March. In May, I’ll be part of an exhibition celebrating Tate Modern’s 25th anniversary, featuring works from the gallery’s collection, including my Delivery Dancer’s Sphere. In November, I’ll have a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York, and I’ll also be showing a new work of mine at the Performa Biennial, a performance art event I’m really looking forward to.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m a big fan of Djuna’s science fiction novels. I’m currently working on a new piece based on Æon Flux, which was an animated series produced for MTV back in the early 1990s by Korean-American animator Peter Chung. It follows an Asian assassin in a futuristic dystopian world. The plot is quite confusing, with the main character getting killed off in every episode, only to reappear in the next one as if nothing had happened. That series made a big impression on me and has inspired much of my work. I’m using the action scenes from Æon Flux as a starting point for my latest project.
We look forward to seeing your upcoming works. Thank you very much for the interview!
Thank you!
My name is Ayoung Kim, and I’m a new media artist. I create fictional worlds using various new media.
Can you tell the “uninitiated” about the world you created in Delivery Dancer?
Delivery Dancer is a cycle of works I started in 2022. The latest additions to the cycle are Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse, which was shown at the ACC, and Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0° Receiver, which was commissioned by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). The very first work in the cycle, Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, is a single-channel video installation about a fictional courier for a food delivery app called “Delivery Dancer” in an imaginary future Seoul. It’s the upshot of questions I pondered while confined to my studio during the pandemic and ordering food on delivery apps daily.
At the time, I thought to myself: “These drivers race across the deserted city to drop off some food, then immediately take off again to deliver the next order. They have no interaction with us and remain anonymous, doing invisible work.” I wondered where these people were coming from and where they were going, and these questions became the starting point for my project. I researched the platform-based gig economy of invisible or “ghost” work increasingly controlled by algorithms. The research helped me understand a wide range of phenomena in present-day society.
In Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, I sought to fold and intertwine space and time to create a labyrinth. After completing the project in 2022, I received very positive feedback –and the ACC Future Prize. So I followed it up with Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse, set in a new, underground world called Novaria, in which ancient and modern calendars collide. It’s a story about resistance, with two protagonists striving to restore the ancient world’s conception of time and cosmology.
In every era, new technologies give rise to new discourse and art forms, which I find fascinating. I’ve conducted extensive research on how deeply we can actually communicate with generative AI and discovered a number of intriguing aspects. For one thing, I’ve come to realize that understanding the grammar of a generative AI model is essential for effective communication. It’s clear to me that AI is merely a tool and cannot develop a will of its own. It still lacks the feelings, the experience of pain, that’s necessary for creative processes.
At present, AI is incapable of carrying out a creative process by itself for a human target audience. AI-generated works don’t mean anything unless humans recognize their value. Then again, this is only true if humans are the target group. If we ever reach a point where AIs value one another’s works, we’ll have entered a realm beyond human consciousness.
Everyone who has worked with AI agrees that understanding its grammar is crucial. I found that very interesting. It involves asking a question, receiving an unexpected result and then repeatedly refining and readjusting the question. I call this process “care work.” It’s like communicating with a child that can’t express itself clearly yet and constantly trying to understand what the child is trying to say by means of different approaches.
New technologies are emerging every day, and soon it will be hard to imagine the world without them. In my view, contemporary art and culture can set themselves apart from developments in business and industry by distorting or reconstructing these technologies. This is how art has always survived. Which is why artists today need to keep developing not only their technology skills, but also their technological “literacy,” even if it’s an exhausting ongoing process.
If they don’t, technology will become increasingly incomprehensible and mystifying. More and more realms of our technologically advanced society are turning into black boxes. The algorithms used by big tech companies in particular are so complex and such a closely guarded secret that it’s almost impossible to figure out how they work. That’s why I believe endeavors to understand the mechanisms of generative AI, whatever form such efforts may take, are absolutely essential today.
You seem to like fantasy and science fiction, as well as combinations of the two. What appeals to you about these genres?
After completing my studies in the UK, I participated in a residency program in Germany, in which I developed a keen awareness of modernization processes in Europe and Korea. At the time, I had already been working on studies of modernity in Korea, which involved delving deeply into historical materials. At first, I created fictional worlds based on historical facts, but I came up against limitations when experimenting with aesthetic autonomy. Dealing with historical events made me cautious, so I wondered how I could express aesthetic autonomy more freely. At the time – that was around 2017 – I was heavily influenced by fantasy literature.
I was drawn to Afrofuturism, especially the writings of Octavia Butler, as well as science fiction by female and queer writers or featuring minorities. I particularly admire Djuna, a Korean sci-fi writer, whom I consider a national treasure. These authors led me to the realization that sci-fi novels about minorities are not just amusing experiments: they use fantasy and science fiction as political and aesthetic angles from which to perceive reality in new ways. This realization inspired me to maintain my problem-conscious view of the world while developing my aesthetic autonomy. I began freely inventing fictional works as a result.
You have a pronounced talent for using virtual imagination to shed light on real-life problems relating to migration, women and refugees. What themes and forms can be found in your Many Worlds Over exhibition at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart since February 2025?
(Ayoung shows a simulation of the exhibition space)
Many Worlds Over showcases a significant portion of my Delivery Dancer series in all five rooms on the first floor of the museum. The title was the upshot of in-depth discussions with the exhibition's curators, Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, as well as the curator Charlotte Knaup. My works are inspired by the theory of possible worlds. While each exhibit functions as a self-contained world, each of them could also be a different version of one and the same world. I sought to create environments in which, as you move through the exhibition, you continually wonder whether you’re in the same space at a different time or encountering a future version of yourself. This experience of déjà vu in subtly shifting worlds is why we settled on the title “Many Worlds Over.”
When you enter the exhibition, you see yourself reflected doubly or triply in countless mirrors, which produce an optical illusion. The two female protagonists of Delivery Dancer’s Arc, Ernst Mo and En Storm, look identical, which also serves to create a sense of duality. I used industrial frame modules to design a space resembling a shipping warehouse, a labyrinthine structure in which time and space intertwine. The exhibition features various media, starting with the video from Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, the first installment of the Delivery Dancer series. It includes derivative installations like the Orbit Dance Series, as well as a game called Stipulation, and concludes with my latest work, a three-channel video installation called Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0° Receiver.
Yes, that’s right. The audiovisual experience is quite diverse, including installations and sculptures as well as works using mannequins. Fortunately, the shipping of the exhibits and the preparations for the show went smoothly. Hamburger Bahnhof put out a specially designed catalog for the show. It’s very lightweight, which makes it easy to carry around, and very reasonably priced.
In this digital age, it seems rather unusual for information to be found not on our cell phones but on the printed sheets of a catalog, thereby extending the experience to the space outside the museum. Does the catalog contain any special content?
When planning the exhibition, Sam Bardaouil found the role of Korean webtoon subculture in my work particularly fascinating. The curators showed great interest in webtoons, which are a significant part of my work, but still relatively unknown in Germany. They were especially intrigued by “GL” – which is short for “Girls’ Love” –, a subgenre focusing on queer relationships between women. My work is heavily influenced by webtoons and web novels, so I understood their curiosity. In the wallpaper installation Evening Peak Time Is Back, I used characters developed in collaboration with webtoon artist 1172 based on the GL webtoon style. As a long-time fan of this genre, I wanted to amplify the voices of queer women.
So the catalog includes excerpts from two GL webtoon works: Kill Switch by 1172 and Haegu (Sea Trench) by cosmos, both of which are intended for adult viewers. In consultation with the artists, we selected and edited images for the layout. These works appear repeatedly on full-page spreads in the catalog. Since the term “GL” isn’t widely used in Europe, the curators found this genre particularly interesting and felt a strong need to showcase it.
Was there a particular reason for this exhibition to be held at Hamburger Bahnhof?
Before going into this question, I want to take this opportunity to express my gratitude for the invitation to show my work. My one-year residency at Berlin’s Künstlerhaus Betanien in 2011 was a truly happy and instructive time for me. It greatly influenced my development as an artist, and my interaction with other artists there led to many synergies. That experience holds a special place in my memories of my youth.
Hamburger Bahnhof was my favorite art museum at the time. It’s the epicenter of contemporary art, and everyone dreams of having an exhibition there. Early last year, I suddenly found myself wondering what it would be like to have a solo show at Hamburger Bahnhof one day. That was my dream, so when Sam Bardaouil contacted me just a few months later, I was surprised and delighted by the news.
It’s like something out of a movie!
I feel incredibly grateful. Having a solo exhibition in a German national museum is a milestone for me, given my current stage of development as an artist, and I have high hopes that it will be a turning point in my artistic career, opening up new opportunities for me
It involved curating existing works in a new context, so I was very excited about seeing how the curators would combine them. We had lots of brainstorming sessions. The fact that the exhibition was spread across five rooms was a special challenge. My previous exhibitions have either been held in one large room or solo shows focused on a single project. This was my first solo exhibition consisting of multiple works. The curators proposed various solutions, and I was impressed by their sense of scenography, spatial design and wayfinding.
I was also really impressed by how the exhibition incorporated concepts like meeting your own clone, exploring infinite possible worlds and the possibility of multiple timelines. It was a pleasure to see that my work could be exhibited in this way.
What should exhibitiongoers look out for in particular?
The exhibition is like a labyrinth, constantly overlapping and expanding into different corners. Exhibitiongoers will find themselves repeatedly encountering another self from another world. I hope they’ll be willing to let go, to lose themselves in the labyrinth and imagine countless possible worlds. This exhibition mirrors the world we live in today, in which technology permeates every aspect of our lives. I wanted to suggest a new way of thinking about the present through the prism of fantasy fiction.
What’s next for you after the Hamburger Bahnhof exhibition?
My next exhibition will be a solo show at Atelier Hermès in Seoul, starting in late March. In May, I’ll be part of an exhibition celebrating Tate Modern’s 25th anniversary, featuring works from the gallery’s collection, including my Delivery Dancer’s Sphere. In November, I’ll have a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York, and I’ll also be showing a new work of mine at the Performa Biennial, a performance art event I’m really looking forward to.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m a big fan of Djuna’s science fiction novels. I’m currently working on a new piece based on Æon Flux, which was an animated series produced for MTV back in the early 1990s by Korean-American animator Peter Chung. It follows an Asian assassin in a futuristic dystopian world. The plot is quite confusing, with the main character getting killed off in every episode, only to reappear in the next one as if nothing had happened. That series made a big impression on me and has inspired much of my work. I’m using the action scenes from Æon Flux as a starting point for my latest project.
We look forward to seeing your upcoming works. Thank you very much for the interview!
Thank you!
