The Korean digital artist Ayoung Kim, identified for utilizing cinematic methods and video-game engines to construct huge interactive environments, has received the third LG Guggenheim Award. The annual prize, awarded by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the multinational electronics firm LG, recognises artists doing vital and modern work on the intersection of artwork and know-how. It comes with an unrestricted $100,000 honorarium and a future public programme on the museum.
“What artists can do with know-how is discover the unsure potentialities it might conceal and deploy it in essentially the most intuitive method,” Kim stated in an announcement. “Neither a techno-determinist nor a techno-pessimist, I’ve all the time wished to touch upon the impression of know-how in our society by utilizing it.”
Ayoung Kim, Porosity Valley 2: Tricksters’ Plot, 2019 © Ayoung Kim. Picture: Swan Park
Kim has used know-how in nearly each cutting-edge kind in her work. Her upcoming solo present at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof (28 February-20 July), as an illustration, incorporates synthetic intelligence (AI), video games, movies and sculptures that may allow guests to discover her infinitely unfolding digital environments. Her observe incorporates motion-capture know-how, animation software program, live-action video, efficiency, reside simulation and extra.
Kim’s digital realms incorporate parts of Webtoons, the episodic digital comics popularised in South Korea, in addition to the nation’s GL (Women’ Love) queer subculture. Her Supply Dancer mission, for instance, invitations gamers to navigate an avatar of a delivery-gig employee by a seemingly infinite and futuristic digital reproduction of Seoul, whereas an accompanying live-action video follows a up to date gig employee on a sci-fi supply route, which is often paused for dancing interludes.
Ayoung Kim, Supply Dancer’s Arc: Inverse, 2024 (nonetheless) © Ayoung Kim
“At its core, Ayoung Kim’s path-breaking work invitations viewers not solely to marvel at her technical mastery but additionally to have interaction with deep questions on time and the human expertise in an accelerating digital age,” Naomi Beckwith, the Guggenheim’s deputy director and chief curator, stated in an announcement. “By revealing the convergence of machines and humanity, her visionary work illuminates essentially the most urgent challenges of our period.”
Born and primarily based in Seoul, Kim acquired her BFA from Kookmin College, a BA in images from London School of Communication and an MFA from the Chelsea School of Arts in London. Her work is at present featured within the main digital-art survey Machine Love: Video Sport, AI and Modern Artwork (till 8 June) on the Mori Artwork Museum in Tokyo.
Ayoung Kim, Supply Dancer’s Arc: 0º Receiver, 2024 (nonetheless) © Ayoung Kim
Along with her upcoming present at Hamburger Bahnhof, she’s going to open initiatives later this 12 months at M+ in Hong Kong and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. Kim may even have a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 (6 November-16 March 2026), the Museum of Fashionable Artwork’s contemporary-art kunsthalle in Queens, New York. She is represented by Gallery Hyundai, one of the crucial outstanding Korean galleries.
Kim is the third artist to obtain the LG Guggenheim Award, which was awarded to Stephanie Dinkins—the US artist identified for her pioneering work with AI—in its inaugural version in 2023, and to the Taiwan-born Web artwork trailblazer Shu Lea Cheang final 12 months.
