Last week, ascendant time-based artist Ayoung Kim unveiled her latest solo show, “Delivery Dancer Codex,” at MoMA PS1—marking the U.S. debut of her acclaimed Delivery Dancer video trilogy. This week, the hotly anticipated Lower East Side art venue Canyon is opening up its unfinished space to host Body^n, Kim’s commissioned performance for this year’s Performa biennial. The 50-minute ticketed spectacle will offer a rare opportunity to experience Kim’s Delivery Dancer series in the flesh.
Although Kim’s films have catapulted her to global fame, she has a long history with performance too. In 2016, Kim activated Lee Bul’s installation Willing to Be Vulnerable-Interlude (2015–16) at Korea’s National Museum of Modern Art with hazmat-suited dancers. In 2015, she activated her own installation at the 56th Venice Biennale with a choral performance. Nevertheless, Body^n marks Kim’s first time facilitating motion capture before a live audience, “which actually reveals some of the behind-the-scenes of my video production,” the South Korean artist told me over email.
Portrait of Ayoung Kim. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Hyundai. Photo: Kanghyuk (snakepool).
Kim uses motion capture technology throughout her Delivery Dancer films, which center on the tension between two delivery driving doppelgängers, Ernst Mo and En Storm—enemies and lovers racing against time, and their capitalist overlords. Both characters share one avatar—a 3D-scan of the actor Seokyung Jang’s body.
So, who are the real Ernst Mo and En Storm? Are they Jang, the motion capture actor animating their bodies, or each other, or something else? Like this, motion capture constantly requires Kim to rethink identity. Although Body^n is part of the Delivery Dancer universe, Kim is uniquely harnessing this live performance to make visible the human labor underpinning her technology-heavy films—and probe the infinite selves that arise from the process of making them.
“Digital presence is often categorized within a binary of physical and virtual,” Kim observed. “But between these two, countless fictional zones emerge, and the sense of ‘altered presence’ which I would like to name.”
Rendering of the exterior of Canyon. Photo: New Affiliates Architects.
Body^n will feature four actors performing choreography on a stage, in the round, while hooked up to motion capture technology. Seoul-based Hyesook Kim (a former member of the Korean national Taekwondo team) and Cha-i Kim (who won an Emmy for her Squid Game stunts) will play En Storm and Ernst Mo, respectively. Jenny Gao and Kimie Parker, both contemporary dancers from New York, will shadow them with supplemental flourish. The performers’ movements will be projected onto various avatars that will appear on two large screens throughout Canyon’s spacious, still-raw central hall. “It’s very interesting to see the contrast between the movements of the stunt actors and the performers with backgrounds of dance,” Kim said.
Snippets from the Delivery Dancer films will provide the script to this nonlinear story. “The entire narrative is a synthetic outcome of the entire Delivery Dancer series,” Kim noted. “But as the nature of transmedial storytelling suggests, the story differs following the performative nature.” Her series often span various media, offering viewers new avenues to explore their themes. In 2022, she made a playable video game based on the Delivery Dancer series, for instance.
Defne Ayas. Photo by Zeynep Özkanca
Body^n actually started germinating at Performa 2023. There, curator Defne Ayas hosted a public conversation where she and Kim started imagining what this commission might look like. Over email, Ayas told me she considered that event “a transparent way to reveal the ‘secret ingredient’ of our commissioning process at Performa.” It also started a chain reaction that recruited the work’s sponsor, the Samsung Foundation of Culture.
Ayas and Kim explored industrial venues that “could resonate with the logic and aesthetics of the Delivery Dancer trilogy,” Ayas said. One space in Long Island City, the neighborhood that’s home to MoMA PS1, looked promising. But, it fell through. Esa Nickle, the executive producer behind Body^n, eventually approached Canyon. “We always believe that Plan B often turns out better than Plan A,” Ayas said. “That was certainly the case here.”
Canyon director Joe Thompson told me via email that the venue welcomed Kim even though its renovations haven’t even started because: “We greatly admire Ayoung’s work and anticipate featuring it in one of our first exhibitions focused on art that engages the tools, techniques, and tropes of digital gaming.”
Kim is only staging three performances of Body^n this week—at 8:30pm on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings. Fortunately, “Delivery Dancer Codex” will remain on view for four more months after she leaves.