Perhaps more than any other artwork made during the 2020s, Ayoung Kim’s video Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (2022) captures the dizzying, unsettled quality that characterized so much of the world under Covid-induced lockdown. But this is not a video about isolation or illness, or even a work about the pandemic, exactly. Instead, it deals with something else entirely: the experience of those who really suffered—and survived—while most of us holed up at home, and how those people conjured new universes for themselves in an altered society.The video’s tangled plot centers around two female delivery workers who zip around Seoul, where Kim is based, on sleek white motorcycles. These women seem to be pitted against, and compulsively attracted to, one another. As they undertake their drop-offs, navigating twisty alleyways with the help of an app, they fly through space and do battle. At times, documentary-style footage gives way to anime-style cartoon sequences; Kim also enlisted AI and gaming engines to produce some of her images.Delivery Dancer’s Sphere is so vivid because Kim got close to real-life delivery workers, whom she managed to shadow during the pandemic. “I had this one interviewee, this amazing, skillful delivery worker, and I realized it was impossible to understand what it was like unless I followed her,” Kim told me recently, speaking by Zoom from her studio in Seoul. “So, I asked her to bring me.”The artist shared her screen with me and pulled up a PowerPoint presentation with hundreds of slides. She paused on one with pictures of a helmet-wearing person hugging a delivery worker who zips down a road. “That’s me,” Kim said of the passenger riding in tow. “It was really liberating,” she continued, being able to visit “so many strange and unknown, hidden places that I’ve never been, even though I’m so familiar with the city.”Ayoung Kim, Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse (still), 2024.Courtesy the artist and ACCShe also got to observe how that worker navigated daily life via her employer’s app, traveling according to a digital map and repeatedly accepting and declining calls from customers. “Almost 99 percent of contemporary people are the techno-precariat,” Kim said, referring to a class whose life has been made unstable by our digital overlords. “We don’t know what’s actually going on behind big tech companies’ regimes. I’m curious about [their] reshaping of our understanding of time and temporality.”Kim has been making heady videos and installations about labor, capitalism, and worlds to come for over a decade now. But despite having shown widely in South Korea, Kim’s work has only recently started appearing in multiple venues in the US and Europe.Tate in London acquired Delivery Dancer’s Sphere out of Frieze Seoul in 2022, and since then, the video and its follow-ups have since been shown frequently, with one recently appearing on the facade of the M+ museum in Hong Kong earlier this year. Following a showing at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof museum this past spring, Delivery Dancer’s Sphere and the other two films in the “Delivery Dancer” series will head next to MoMA PS1 in New York, which is staging Kim’s first US solo exhibition, opening this week. Later this month, Kim will also debut a new “Delivery Dancer” work, a motion-capture piece involving live stunt performers, at the Performa festival in New York.“Many people work with AI, many people work with data, but she’s going a few steps further,” said Defne Ayas, the curator of Kim’s Performa commission. “I think the art world really has been waiting for somebody like her.” Only half-jokingly, Ayas called Kim “our prophetess.”The grind has been intense for Kim, who recently won a $100,000 award from the Guggenheim Museum and LG. Kim used to largely work alone, but in the past two years, she has brought on five full-time studio managers, only two of whom are charged with helping Kim use gaming engines and other technologies. (The other three aid Kim in liaising with her many collaborators, of which there are quite a few these days.) It only recently dawned on Kim, 46, that she wasn’t “that young artist” anymore, as she put it.Still, in between an onslaught of exhibitions and commissions, Kim has prioritized watching films and TV shows in her spare time. During our Zoom, she revealed a range of inspirations, including Æon Flux, an animated MTV series from the ’90s about a dominatrix–cum–secret agent in a futuristic world, and more recent examples from a genre of anime known as GL, or Girls’ Love, which centers female friendships with erotic overtones. She described a “fascination with female-to-female antagonism, love and romance, emotional things that are entangled.”Despite the role that moving-image media has played in shaping Kim as an artist, and despite her art even having been shown at film festivals, she said that, according to “the dutiful, authoritative dogma, my work is not seen as cinema.” None of the “Delivery Dancers” works have a plot that is easy to follow, and the last piece in the trilogy, an astonishing three-screen installation called Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0° Receiver (2024), toggles frequently between genres and aspect ratios.Ayoung Kim, Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, 2022.Courtesy the artist and Gallery HyundaiBut Kim approaches her work as a traditional filmmaker might, writing extensive shot lists and storyboarding sequences prior to shooting. “I try to describe every sequence in a very dense detail, because I have to share it with our production team,” she said. But she also added, “In editing, I change the plot quite a lot, in terms of the sequence of the scenes. I make it more labyrinthine in the end.”She expressed a deep reverence for puzzling kinds of filmmaking, including Alain Resnais’s modernist masterpiece Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and the works of Hong Sang-soo, one of the great living Korean auteurs. Kim claimed that few would be able to tell how much these movies had influenced the “Delivery Dancer” series. “It’s the multiplicity, the possibility of opening multiple worlds—all the possibility of one shot, one sequence” Kim said.Born in 1979 in Seoul, Kim initially trained to become a graphic designer, studying that subject as an undergraduate at Kookmin University. During her 20s, amid what she described as a “very hard time in my life,” she left Korea for the UK, where she started over again, studying photography at the London College of Communication. She immersed herself in academic conversations about postcolonialism, but she had what she called a “problem”: The UK was an imperialist power, “but it was also dominating postcolonial discourse as well,” as she put it.Newly aware of her status as an Asian woman abroad, she began to reassess Hollywood science-fiction films she’d come to love, including Blade Runner (1982). In many of these works, “no Asian entities have their own agency,” Kim pointed out. She began to ask herself: “What could be [a form of] agency-retaining, somehow thinking about our future?”Initially, she answered that question by journeying far into the past. Certain works drew on histories that had not directly touched Kim. Her series “PH Express” (2011–12) around Port Hamilton, a group of islands in Korea’s Jeju Strait that was occupied by British troops during the 19th century. Other pieces were more personal. A group of installations collectively titled “Zepheth, Whale Oil from the Hanging Gardens to You” (2014–15) meditate on Saudi Arabia’s oil industry of the 1980s; the artist’s father took part, becoming one of many migrants to join the country’s workforce during that boom period. Bodies of work like this one earned the attention of curators such as Okwui Enwezor, who included a piece from the “Zepheth” series in his 2015 Venice Biennale.But around 2016, as Kim began to read speculative sci-fi by Octavia Butler and Donna Haraway, her work shifted course. “I realized, ‘Oh, my God, you can’t research that much! You’re not a historian, and you’re not rebuilding history.’ An artist’s role is not writing history again.”Ayoung Kim, Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, 2022.Courtesy the artist and Gallery HyundaiKim’s work since then has appeared futuristic, and indeed, one of her latest works, a piece that will debut at the forthcoming Powerhouse Parramatta museum in Sydney, conjures a gleaming mall with Baroque and Neoclassical flourishes that’s host to a Dancer of the Year contest. (The film is really an action movie, Kim promised.) Kim showed me renderings of her imagined mall, which looked to me like a building from 2125, not 2025, with impossibly large towers made of glass and metal.Ruba Katrib, the curator of Kim’s PS1 show, said that the artist deliberately constructs an unusual continuum between past, present, and future. “It’s this nonlinear time,” she said, where “you’re stuck in this loop. Her characters are trying to escape the loop, but they can’t, really. Maybe they don’t want to escape.”Katrib also described Kim’s films as being romantic, as did Ayas, the Performa commission curator. The latter work, titled Body^n. will involve performers enacting choreographies live before an audience. (Kim Cha-I, who conceived the choreography for the Netflix series Squid Game, was among those who helped Kim with the piece.) With the help of motion-capture technology, their images will be transported to digital landscapes via screens. Ayas said that the performers’ movements are so intimate that she asked Kim: “Should we turn the lights off here, to make sure their love is expressed?”Kim herself admitted that the characters in her “Delivery Dancer” works are enacting a kind of courtship. “Their love stories will never be fulfilled in the entire universe,” she told me, “because somehow, they meet and part and meet and part again and again, as the worlds reset and the stories restart again and again. It’s their destiny.”