For authors like Charles Dickens or Franz Kafka, the modern office worker mired in mind-numbing bureaucracy served as a model for the human condition. For the Korean artist Ayoung Kim, the 21st-century urban delivery worker serves that role. In a series of breakneck-paced videos and haunting sculptures at MoMA PS1, and a recent performance in the Performa Biennial, her characters race through the city, monitored by apps and algorithms that simulate the video game experience.
However, the delivery worker isn’t an outlier. Instead, he or she is a prototype for how we work in the gig economy and how time and space have changed in the digital era.
Kim, 46, arrived in New York this fall with a lot of fanfare. She is currently on the cover of Artforum and Frieze magazines. She has been making video art for more than a decade, and her New York presentation centers on the “Delivery Dancer” series, inspired by the delivery workers who populated a near-empty Seoul during the pandemic. (Kim later interviewed drivers—the ones she contacted were mostly female— and even accompanied them on their routes, filming the experience on a camera attached to her helmet.)
At MoMA PS1, there are three “Delivery Dancer” video installations, sculptures recreating a sundial, and delicate abstract metal sculptures suspended from the ceiling that suggest the immaterial network of information in which we’re living.
The videos were created with video game engines — a popular medium among video artists — as well as live-action footage and artificial intelligence. Together, they create a high-impact sensory experience where contemporary life, speculative fiction, Asian futurism and social documentary all meet.
The earliest video at MoMA PS1 is “Delivery Dancer’s Sphere” (2022), a 25-minute video that introduces us to Ernst Mo, a high-level driver, based on her performance, which can be compared to the player-levels in video games. Racing through the city, discovering seemingly invisible routes, Ernst Mo stumbles into a glitch in the matrix where she encounters En Storm, an alter-ego but also a romantic interest inspired by GL (Girls’ Love), a genre of Japanese anime that highlights relationships between women, from emotional to sexual ones. (The names “Ernst Mo” and “En Storm” are anagrams of “monster.”)
As Ernst Mo plays hooky with En Storm, in a universe apart from the delivery app, her ratings plummet, threatening her job. The greater question becomes: What is real life? Productivity and optimization or the emotional connection she has with En Storm?
The video world becomes even more abstract in “Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0 degree Receiver” (2024) a video installation that begins with delivery workers racing through a desert landscape on a science-fiction-style mission: to deliver time. Kim points out here that people used to follow their own, local calendars, marked by the stars or the seasons. Then came global, universal time regulated by atomic clocks.
Now we’ve entered a new world controlled by digital technology. The delivery drivers may be on the vanguard of work-time controlled by algorithms, but they’re stand-ins for the rest of us who feel the disorienting and hallucinatory effects.
The most recent video, “Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse” (2024) takes space-time exploration to a new level. There are wedge-shaped platforms for viewers to recline on under a triangle of videos suspended from the ceiling at MoMA PS1, as we’re introduced to Novaria, a fictional universe with a vertical city that seems to float in space.
Here, the delivery workers deliver lost artifacts that look like ancient stone or metal objects. There’s a whiff of old cinema here, from Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1927), inspired by the plight of industrial factory workers, to Terry Gilliam’s techno-dystopia in “Brazil” (1985). Kim herself cites French New Wave cinema and the Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo as inspirations.
Kim’s performances in November for Performa, mounted at the video-art space Canyon on New York’s Lower East Side and titled “Body^n,” retooled the “Delivery Dancer” series videos and added a narrative device: a conversation between Ernst Mo and a sympathetic counselor who comments on the psychological effects of the delivery worker’s demanding job and her attempts to escape it with En Storm.
In the piece, two screens ran a remix of scenes from the three videos at MoMA PS1. On a stage in front of the screens, two performers shed Delivery Dancer uniforms to reveal black unitards outfitted with dozens of tiny motion-capture cameras that captured the performers’ movements and translated them into animated figures on the screens. It was a clever way of connecting real bodies with virtual ones.
The new digital approaches in the videos are dazzling, but Kim’s work actually relies on an ancient human technology: narrative. I thought several times of the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, whose writing about labyrinths — a recurring motif in Kim’s films — predicted the structure of the internet. Similarly, games, whether they are video games or the apps the drivers use — which try to treat work as a form of play — sits at the heart of these videos.
At one point in the Performa project, the animated bodies programmed by live stuntwomen suddenly became objects: a bicycle and a ladder battling (anthropomorphically) on a stage in a fulfillment warehouse. I thought of Marcel Duchamp’s bicycle wheel, an early modern art monument that slyly, satirically replaced handmade art objects with industrial “readymade” ones.
Duchamp’s statement has remained vital. A century and a half ago, machines took over jobs and regulated time — including the office workers in Dickens and Kafka novels. Now algorithms and A.I. are seizing control, with work packaged as “fun” video games and precarious labor as “freedom.” Unlike Duchamp, Kim’s sculptures are more forgettable, relying on figures and motifs ripped from the videos and displayed in dramatic, theatrical settings. However, her videos and performances channel, with clarity and breathless dynamism, the anxieties and realities of contemporary life. At a moment when reality feels like fiction and fiction makes sense of reality, characters like Ernst Mo and En Storm are not just relatable, but necessary.
Ayoung Kim: Delivery Dancer Codex
Through March 16, MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Queens; 718-784-2086, momaps1.org.
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