Ayoung Kim: Delivery Dancer’s Arc—Inverse

The National Asian Culture Center (ACC) (President Lee Kanghyun) of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism is pleased to announce the creation of the ACC Future Prize and its inaugural exhibition ACC Future Prize: Ayoung Kim, on view from August 30, 2024, through February 16, 2025.

The ACC Future Prize is an interdisciplinary art award that honors innovative artists who push the boundaries of creativity and explore new possibilities for the future. Ayoung Kim’s research has extensively examined the connections between fact and fiction, documentation and portrayal, and the contemporary challenges arising from historical events in social, cultural, political, and economic spheres. Since 2017, in particular, Ayoung Kim has gained recognition in both domestic and international art scenes for her distinctive approach, which transforms the grand narratives of migration, capitalism, and state ideology into complex, hybrid speculative narratives, blending elements of archaeology, futurism, and science fiction.

In this exhibition, Kim highlights the numerous traditional calendar and timekeeping practices that have been forgotten or lost due to Western modernization. Although each culture possesses its own unique timekeeping system and calendar, reflecting its history and philosophy, the Gregorian calendar has become the global standard in the modern world. The standardization of time and calendars is linked to the dynamics of imperialism and political power during modernization and globalization. This work puts forth the traditional cosmologies and time systems of diverse cultures that have gradually vanished due to Western modernization, reflecting her effort to reintroduce them into the narrative of contemporary art.

In the prequel, Delivery Dancer's Arc, Ernst Mo and En Storm, the two protagonists who raced through Seoul in the virtual world and fell into a maze of time delays and navigation, find themselves in a new virtual city. When Ernst Mo accidentally delivers an artifact from a past time known to have been lost, she finds himself in the middle of a clash between different time periods and worlds. In the exhibition title, “Arc” references the curves and arcs of sundials and calendar plates featured in the works, symbolizing the timeline, and evoking the connection between time and space, humans and history, and spaces of escape. “Inverse” refers to the concept of an inverse relationship, specifically the idea of time as the inverse of speed in physics.

It suggests that alternative times and spaces exist, with multiple worlds coexisting within the gaps formed by the relentless pace of competition. Furthermore, it highlights the adaptable nature of the Delivery Dancer series where protagonists maintain their self-identity yet are capable of change and emphasizes the central question of the series—mirroring the “story” that twists, folds, and meanders. This “transformation” of time “connects” space and time, and in the process, provides an opportunity for indigenous worldviews, which are often marginalized and erased, to reflect on the complex relationship between tradition and modernity and the meaning of time.

The ACC Future Prize has closely looked at Kim’s work because it delves into her exploration of time and modernity, connecting modernization with imperialism, tradition with indigenousness, and history with the future. It represents an effort to comprehend the conflicts and disruptions caused by modernity and to envision a non-Western, Asian future that fosters and broadens new possibilities. Moreover, Ayoung Kim earnestly activates the tense of the future through her collaboration with AI. The computational outputs of AI systems, derived from her speculative narrative, represent not just a vision of the future but an ongoing calculation of what the future could be. She combines tradition and modernity in the flow of cosmic time and unfolds an imagined future in which numerous modernities collide, break, and reappropriate. This is a question about contemporary human life and the present, and a vast journey to new life possibilities in search of answers.