Ayoung Kim
Flip Side Dancers, 2025
Lenticular print
19 x 14 inches
Edition of 50
$750
 
GYOPO’s 2025 annual limited artist edition is a lenticular print by Seoul-based artist Ayoung Kim, who works across tech-influenced sculpture, video, and installation. Kim draws from her acclaimed expansive Delivery Dancer series, which explores themes of time, capitalism, gender, queerness, and technological anxieties; the series reflects on South Korea’s meteoric rise onto the global stage and its accelerationists’ neo-liberal tendency.
 
Her first lenticular print, Flip Side Dancers features couriers or “dancers,” who appear to face each other, inversely, in the optical image as the viewer moves sideways. Rendered using CGI, live-action, and gaming interfaces, 3D and 2D versions of bodies and objects levitate over a high-rise building located in a fictional city called “Novaria,” which also appears in her large-scale project Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse.
In community with “Girls’ Love” (GL) webtoon supporters, who predominantly identify as queer women, Kim imagines a female protagonist navigating both the epic and mundane across time and space in a hyperfuturistic Seoul and fictional spaces from her Delivery Dancer series. Between the two images, or worlds, a blurred figure in the foreground reveals a helmeted delivery dancer racing towards the viewer, as a circular sundial or calendar in the background becomes more visible. This calendar/sundial, conceived by Kim and a mathematician, collapses Western and indigenous calendars to reflect on how modern time systems shaped a seemingly definitive universal temporality, bypassing innumerable cultural cosmologies and technological understanding of the universe. Hovering between vividly animated mirrored temporalities that seem to break apart, Flip Side Dancers invokes a fundamental sense of uncertainty: How do we perceive worlds, who and what is forgotten, and what prevails?
 
Ayoung Kim weaves reality anew through a tapestry of hybrid narratives while integrating geopolitics, mythology, technology and futuristic iconography in her work. The outcomes of synthesized narratives result in far-reaching speculation, establishing connections between biopolitics and border controls, the memories of stones and virtual memories, and ancestral origins and imminent futures in the forms of video, moving image, virtual reality, game simulation, installation, performance and texts.
 
Kim’s works have been presented at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2025); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2025); ACMI, Melbourne (2024); MoMA, New York (2024); M+, Hong Kong (2024); Sharjah Biennial (2023); Ars Electronica, Linz (2023); Berlin International Film Festival (2020); Gwangju Biennial (2018); Palais de Tokyo (2016) and the Venice Biennale (2015), among others. Kim has received the LG Guggenheim Award, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (2025), ACC Future Prize, National Asian Culture Center, Korea (2024), Golden Nica Award, Prix Ars Electronica, Austria (2023), and Terayama Shuji Prize, Image Forum Festival, Japan (2023) and was a supported artist for the Korea Artist Prize, Korea (2019).