Body^n

2025

Live motion capture performance, approx. 50 min

13–15 Nov 2025
8:30pm
Canyon, New York, United States
 
 
——————————–
 
 
Ayoung Kim Project
Performa 2025 Commission

Written and Directed by Ayoung Kim
Executive Producer: Performa
Studio Producer: Yena Ku
Ayoung Kim Studio: Hyebin Kim, Soyeon Song, Rijin Yoo, Haein Kim
Producer (Seoul): So Young Lee
Studio Tech Manager: Hyebin Kim

Leads: Chai Kim (Ernst Mo), Hyesook Kim (En Storm)
Supporting Casts: Jenny Gao, Kimie Parker
Action Chreographer: Chai Kim (Best Action Team)
Supporting Role Stand-ins (Seoul): Eojin Byun, Jeongyeon So

Consulting Choreographer: Soohyun Hwang, Marie Lloyd Paspe (NY)
Advisory: Jaelee Kim, Soo Ryon Yoon
Research Support: Daim Park, Yewon Seo
Production Assistance: Chae Yu

Game Engine Development: MetaObjects (Andrew Crowe)
Game Engine Technical Art: Seoyeon Kim
Fulfillment Center Level Design (Unity): MetaObjects, Seoyeon Kim, Hyebin Kim
Desert Labyrinth Level Design (Unity): Seoyeon Kim
Mixed World Level Design (Unity): Seoyeon Kim, Hyebin Kim

Motion Capture Setup (New York): Aaron Santiago, Matt Toups, Brad Davis
Technical & Camera Operator (New York): MetaObjects
Show Operator (New York): Astro Seunghwa Lee
Lighting Design: GUMGUM Studio
Stagehand: Jung Min Jo

Technical & Camera Operator (Seoul Rehearsal): Seoyeon Kim
Operating Support (Seoul Rehearsal): Janghan Park
On-site Rehearsal Assistance (Seoul): Heeseo Woo
Motion Capture Studio (Seoul Rehearsal): EMP Studio

Music, Sound Mixing & Mastering: Đ.K. (aka Dang Khoa Chau)

Video Editing, VFX, Color Grading: Hyunji Lee, Ayoung Kim

Costume Design: KIMJISOON
Motion Capture Suit Customization: Huijae Jeong

 

Body^n Video Inserts:
Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, 2022, single-channel video, 25 min.
Delivery Dancer Simulation, 2022, game simulation, approx. 12 min.
Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0º Receiver, 2024, three-channel video, 30 min 32 sec
Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse, 2024, three-channel video, lighting installation, random video playback and lighting synchronization control program, sundial sculptures, graphic sheets and circular screens, 27 min 43 sec., dimensions variable.
 

© Cheonan Museum
Stationery chest

 
 
Thanks to: Ilran Kim, Soyong Shin, Eriko Jimbo, Babou Sanneh, Art Hub Copenhagen.

With deep gratitude to Seokyung Jang, whose image lends enduring presence to Ernst Mo and En Storm.

 
In Partnership with Samsung Foundation of Culture.
Sponsored by Arts Council Korea, SBS Foundation, Performa Commissioning Council members (Yana Peel and Bilge Ogut-Cumbusyan & Haro Cumbusyan).

Performa
Co-produced by Onassis ONX, Canyon
Curated by Defne Ayas (Senior Curator-at-Large, Performa and Director, Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven) with Josefina Barcia (Hartwig Art Foundation Curatorial Fellow)
Managing Director and Executive Producer: Esa Nickle
Producer: Alex Darby
Associate Producer: Andreas Huang
Curator and Manager of Curatorial Affairs: Ikechúkwú Onyewuenyi

Body^n

Source: Performa 2025 Web Site

Performa Commission

What does it mean to see your own body move in ways you never performed? In film and performance, the body double has long symbolized risk, illusion, and perfection. In Body^n, her commission for the Performa 2025 Biennial, Ayoung Kim extends this legacy of the doppelgänger into the digital realm, exploring the invisible labor of bodies as they are captured, replicated, and made unfamiliar through technologies such as motion capture and virtual reality.

What fascinates Kim is the assembled body—a body multiplied, mediated, and estranged from its origin. She situates Body^n in the fictional space where the physical body meets its virtual counterpart. Kim describes this condition as an “altered presence,” a term she coined to express the slippage between embodiment and representation. In this digital realm, the human body vacillates, refracted across interfaces, screens, and stand-ins.

Early instances of this dynamic can be traced to Hollywood’s midcentury musicals, which relied on dancers who stood in for stars prior to filming. Dance historian Anthea Kraut, in Hollywood Dance-ins and the Reproduction of Bodies (2025), shows how “the body,” as mediated through film and culture, is built on a chain of “reproductions, substitutions, and displacements.” Modern technologies—from phones and sensors to wearables—extend this lineage, revealing how bodies in motion remain caught in asymmetrical systems of visibility and value. Kim reframes this economy of substitution within the digital sphere, exposing how physical risk, affective labor, and historical displacement are inscribed into the very interfaces that double, divide, and reassemble the body.

For the movement vocabulary and scenography, Kim draws on the aesthetics of video games, martial arts, and “Girls’ Love”—a comic genre centered on female-to-female romantic relationships—to probe the recursive loop of doubling and substitution in contemporary image-making. While “Girls’ Love” often depicts intimacy and emotional ties between women, Kim engages the genre not to reproduce its narratives, but to borrow its sensibility as a lens for imagining alternative relations and worlds. In this sense, “Girls’ Love” functions less as a fixed genre reference than a cultural resource, resonating with her interest in repetition, multiplicity, and speculative storytelling.

Actualizing this question of embodiment, Kim’s Performa Commission places two performers—working in tandem with a choreographer—at the center of a stage apparatus that generates live motion-capture data. Their movements animate not only human avatars on a screen but also non-human digital props such as bicycles, ladders, and other speculative forms. These data streams are projected into game engine-built worlds that Kim and her team have been developing for years: a dense city center, a desert expanse, the interior of a fulfillment center. As the performers navigate both the physical venue and the digital—their bodies duplicated and displaced, refracted through layers of code—the line between virtuality and reality collapses into something far less unstable: a choreography of conjecture, estrangement, and uncanny recognition.

Kim challenges the assumption that her work is purely virtual by foregrounding the invisible labor behind digital creation. Motion capture undergirding these digital portals is not just a technical process of algorithmic code—it is also a physical practice that depends on strenuous rehearsal, interpersonal sensitivity, and the willingness to be overwritten by others. If performance is often thought of as a mask, Kim reframes it as a mirrored screen—one that unsettles familiar debates on the politics of representation by exposing their complicated entanglements in the digital realm. The result, in Body^n, is a performance that playfully cracks open the virtual: revealing the affective, ethical, and material labor that scaffolds the illusion.

– Defne Ayas and Performa