Around the Galleries is a series exploring the intersection of cinema and the art world.
Delivery Dancer's Arc: Inverse (Ayoung Kim, 2024). Courtesy of the artist.
What [she] has seen [she] does not understand, but what [she] sees [she] is on fire for, and the same error both seduces and deceives [her] eyes.
— Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book III, trans. A.S. K, parenthetical edits by the author
What does it mean to fall in love with oneself in the digital age? Delivery Dancer Codex, the U.S. solo debut of Korean artist Ayoung Kim which showed at MoMA PS1 this winter, redefines narcissism under the obsessive reliance on technology in today’s world.
Kim’s practice draws on media technologies to construct speculative fictions based on current geopolitical events. Her research integrates media analysis and data drawn from historical transport networks. For instance, in her early work, PH Express (2011–2012), she examines patrol missions and the circulation of telegrams linked to European warships traveling to East Asia. Please Return to Busan Port (from Tales of a City) (2012) traces the cultural and economic histories of horse racing in the South Korean port city, drawing on media reports about jockeys and their horses. In later works, she imagines alternative geopolitical infrastructures, such as the Trans Korean–Manchurian–Siberian Railway, a fictional transcontinental route that traverses political borders by connecting Busan, Seoul, and northern Eurasia across multiple historical timelines. Across her projects, Kim connects diverse modes of transportation to local histories, inventing quasi-mythical characters who navigate social and environmental crises within multi-layered worlds. And this time, she turns to motorcycles.
In Delivery Dancer Codex, Kim presents three interrelated video installations for the first time: Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (2022), a single-channel video shown in an enclosed theater space; Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0° Receiver (2024), a three-channel video projected onto a curved screen, accompanied by a mirror that reflects both the projected images and the audience standing before it; and Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse (2024), an immersive three-channel installation. The screens face outward toward the three corners of the room, each displaying a different video. The audience can lie down on sloped floors and look up at the screens, as if gazing at the sky through a window into another world. Muffled narration, whispered phrases, and xylophone chimes from the audiotrack of Inverse are played from surrounding speakers in the gallery, creating a sense of disorientation and sensory overload. The trio of video works are accompanied by a sundial-like sculptural installation, with six rotating lights that cast shifting shadows across the gallery floor. The sundial marks cyclical time while recalling traditional timekeeping practices lost in Western modernization, reminding viewers of the multiple histories that coexist.
Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse (detail, installation view) (Ayoung Kim, 2024). Courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Roz Akin.
Across the trilogy, the protagonist Ernst Mo is a delivery rider working for the platform Delivery Dancer. Set within a labyrinthine cityscape of neon-lit storefronts and shopping malls—constructed through game engines and 3D scans of Seoul—she rides a motorcycle to complete delivery tasks assigned by a master algorithm known as Dancemaster, which the audience encounters as a disembodied voice directing her along optimized routes, calculated as the shortest distance between pickup and destination. The rider’s job depends on punctuality, ratings, and efficiency; late deliveries lead to penalties and, eventually, removal from the platform, recalling the labor conditions faced by gig workers such as Uber drivers and Fiverr freelancers. In this fictional regime, performance—and even existence—is monitored and monetized by systems of surveillance that perpetuate economic extraction.
Throughout the trilogy, Kim employs eleven performers to inhabit the same character, recalling avatars on digital platforms that can be freely chosen and played by multiple users. A single face, scanned from one actor, is mapped onto the others like a mask, overlaying a unified identity across multiple bodies through machine learning. This technique conjures a form of collective consciousness produced by AI systems trained on vast datasets of sameness, prompting the question: how can we assert individuality amongst indistinguishable data points within a larger system of control?
Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (Ayoung Kim, 2022). Courtesy of the artist.
In the first work in the series, Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, Ernst Mo encounters En Storm, another rider in the system who looks identical to her. Although they are performed by different actors, both avatars share the same digitally mapped face. Their encounter sparks a romance that bends the logic of time and space: the two cannot coexist, and each meeting fractures time, bringing glitches into the system that cause delivery delays. As their ratings fall, their job security is threatened, forcing them to choose between destroying each other or being eliminated from the very system that sustains their livelihood. This fight or flight situation recalls survival-game narratives such as Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000), The Hunger Games books and movies, and Squid Game (2021–25), but the stakes extend beyond physical survival to the existential consequences of confronting—and potentially destroying—oneself. As both lovers and enemies, Ernst Mo and En Storm, with their identical features and mirrored gestures, illustrate a push and pull between attraction and the impossibility of fully identifying with one’s own image. Their forbidden love recalls George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), in which desire itself becomes a mode of resistance under conditions of constant surveillance.
This doubling of the self between Ernst Mo and En Storm further connects to Plato’s theory of love in Symposium, where he describes human beings as once whole, later split in two and condemned to search for their missing half; love for him is “the pursuit of wholeness, the desire to regain what we have lost.” Kim transposes this idea onto a speculative digital landscape that combines the virtual with the real. Here, the doppelgänger resonates with contemporary life, where we continuously encounter our own image through front-facing cameras, video calls, and live-streaming platforms. The romance between the two characters is fueled by narcissism that arises from a dependence on technology for reassurance and self-recognition—an intoxicating promise of wholeness that remains perpetually out of reach.
Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0º Receiver (Ayoung Kim, 2024). Courtesy of the artist.
In Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0° Receiver, Ernst Mo and En Storm ride through urban and suburban landscapes on motorcycles, chasing each other across liminal spaces, brawling on rooftops and terraces, and fighting in surreal, sun-scorched desertscapes. Rendered through motion capture, their movements are violent and intimate at once—at times they seem to be locked in an embrace as they grapple. Their desire to be together is countered by the risk of delayed deliveries and thus being removed from the system. The struggle between longing and self-protection manifests through physical movements performed in real life and translated into 3D characters within a digital environment.
When the avatars fight, they are at once confronting each other and themselves. This love-hate, dance-like battle between the two is both seductive and heart-wrenching, expressing deep emotions through violent gestures, despite existing within a highly technologized, artificial world. Kim’s work suggests a haunting vision of post-human identity: the self fighting against herself under algorithmic control. Her work resonates with Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, emphasizing the conflicting feelings of love and rivalry toward one’s own image, mesmerized and haunted by an ideal self we yearn to but can never fully become.
Kim further references Girls’ Love aesthetics in the gallery’s hallway wallpaper, Evening Peak Time Is Back (2022), where the two characters illustrated in manga style are depicted in intimate scenes set against a nocturnal streetscape. In one image, they lean closely against each other on the same motorcycle, cheeks touching as one wraps her arms around the other’s waist. In another, they cradle each other’s faces, their gazes meeting with noses nearly touching. These charged moments capture the allure and danger of falling in love with one’s own reflection. The Girls’ Love genre, also known as yuri (meaning “lily”), originated in the twentieth century and has since gained popularity across manga, anime, and webcomics. These narratives center on intense emotional bonds between women—sometimes, though not always, romantic. By embedding this visual reference within the exhibition space, Kim situates her work within a broader history of queer representation in popular culture, challenging the stigma historically attached to the complexities of queer relationships, and further complicating the dynamic between her two protagonists.
Delivery Dancer's Arc: Inverse (installation view) (Ayoung Kim, 2024). Courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Roz Akin.
The latest work in the series, Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse is marked by transformation: across time and space, and between the virtual and the physical. AI-generated imagery constantly morphs in form and style: backgrounds slide between real-world cityscapes and surreal landscapes within a single scene, while characters shift from live-action figures to manga-style drawings and game-engine animation within a single shot, creating a disorienting visual field. The montage-like editing and rapid transitions resemble the complex networks of delivery routes navigated by the protagonists, drawing a parallel to the velocity of technological advancement while immersing the viewer in the intertwined logics of speed, labor, and productivity within a capitalist economy.
In Greek mythology, Narcissus falls in love with his own reflection in water and ultimately dies of thirst for this unattainable love. Kim’s trilogy revisits this ancient story through the lens of the digital age, confronting the existential stakes of vanity. As Marshall McLuhan writes in Understanding Media, “The point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves.” In this reading, Narcissus is not truly in love with himself; rather, he is so numbed by his reflection that he fails to recognize it as his own. For McLuhan, narcissism emerges as a byproduct of technological extension: screens, smartphones, and social media act as reflective surfaces that interfere with self-recognition, creating a state of numbness and estrangement that makes it difficult to connect with our own avatars and digital personas.
Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0º Receiver (Ayoung Kim, 2024). Courtesy of the artist.
In Kim’s work, narcissism and the desire to reunite with oneself are inseparable from dependence on technology. On social media, self-image is assigned value through likes, views, and comments, while notifications and messages keep us hyper-alert to how others perceive us. Kim’s medium of video also recalls Rosalind Krauss’s argument in her 1976 article, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” that video produces a split subject, doubled and reflected back through real-time feedback and mirror-like screens. Here, narcissism becomes less a matter of vanity than a condition shaped by the contemporary culture of visibility, self-branding, and attention economy. To love oneself under these conditions is to construct a mediated image of the self, often at the expense of the deeper work of understanding, reconciling, and accepting who one is.
Delivery Dancer Codex addresses narcissism as an ethical and existential warning. Ernest Mo and En Storm—whose names are anagrams of “monster,” from the Latin monstrum, meaning “to warn”—function as cautionary figures, signaling the danger when narcissism becomes a structural feature within systems that amplify the digital self through consumer media. Caught in this feedback loop, the self grows increasingly self-absorbed, enclosed in its own bubble. Against this backdrop, Kim warns the audience of the seductive danger of falling in love with one’s own image, exposing the consequences of overreliance on technology and the ethical stakes of obsessive self-indulgence.