MoMA PS1 opens a major exhibition of Korean artist Ayoung Kim on November 6, 2025, marking the first US presentation of her full Delivery Dancer trilogy. Installed across the museum’s third-floor galleries, Ayoung Kim: Delivery Dancer Codex brings together three large-scale video works that merge live action, gaming engines, CGI, and generative AI into an interconnected narrative about labor, technology, and power systems. The exhibition runs through March 16, 2026.
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Set in a speculative Seoul shaped by algorithmic logistics, the trilogy follows two delivery workers, En Storm and Ernst Mo, anagrammatic “monsters” navigating systems built to extract labor through data. The first chapter, Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (2022), introduces the protagonists inside a city mapped and controlled by a route-generating algorithm called Dancemaster. Kim describes the work as “pandemic fiction,” reflecting the accelerated rise of gig-economy labor in Korea and the United States.
The second work, Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0° Receiver (2024), shifts to a multiverse in which Storm and Mo become couriers of time, moving through fragmented realities structured by astronomical tools and calendar systems. A three-channel format blurs live action with digital space, folding emotional tension into a sci-fi framework.
The newest chapter, Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse (2024), relocates the narrative to Novaria, an alternate world where the protagonists retrieve displaced artifacts. The installation foregrounds the ways Western modernity erased non-Gregorian conceptions of time, pairing video with objects including sundials, phones, mirrors, mannequins, and a large wallpaper work that extends the story beyond the screen.
Across all three works, Kim examines the relationship between data, the body, and the environment, tracing how labor, queerness, and xenophobia intersect inside systems built for speed, optimization, and extraction.
Ayoung Kim has presented work at Mori Art Museum, Tate Modern, Hamburger Bahnhof, M+, MoMA, Ars Electronica, the Sharjah Biennial, the Busan and Gwangju Biennales, and the 56th Venice Biennale. She has received the LG Guggenheim Award (2025), the ACC Future Prize (2024), the Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica (2023), and the Terayama Shuji Prize (2023). Her work is held in the collections of MoMA, Tate, MMCA Korea, Leeum Museum of Art, Sharjah Art Foundation, and others. Kim will also present a new performance commission, Body^n, during Performa Biennial from November 13–15, 2025.
The exhibition is organized by Ruba Katrib, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at MoMA PS1.
