ACC Future Prize 2024
Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse
Language: Korean, English
Publisher: The National Asian Culture Center
First Edition: October 29, 2025
Pages: 228 pages, paperback, color images, 150, 180 x 245cm
ISBN: 979-11-92402-85-7 (93600)
Editor: Sooyoung Leam, Hyemi Oh
Editorial Coordination: Sarah Goddard
Translation: Maya West
Design: Sam Kim
Photography: Cheolki Hong, Sunwoo Kim, Taehwan Park
Photo Retouching: Cheolki Hong, Ayoung Kim, Siyeon Kim 

 

Contents

1. Foreword – Sangug Kim
2. Endorsement – Philip Ziegler
3. Codes to Decipher the Future: ACC Future Prize 2024: Ayoung Kim – Hyemi Oh
4. Plates
5. Ari Larissa Heinrich in Conversation with Ayoung Kim
6. Can Delivery Dancers Shape That Which Shapes Them? Two Postulations on the Delivery Dancer’s Free Fall Attempts – Zian Chen
7. A Time Without an Image – Nora O’ Murchú
8. On Novarian Calendars
9. Roundtable: Ghost Nannies or City Planners? – Production Team
10. Side-eye Collisions: Navigational Pulls of the Spiritual Kind – Jenna Rain Warwick
11. Imagining Different Movements: Speed, Constellations, Bodies – Haeju Kim

 

 

Authors

Zian Chen is currently a contributing editor for Ocula magazine and a founding editor of Pailang Journal. His collaborative research and curatorial projects realized with other practitioners have been presented at institutions such as the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; Power Station of Art, Shanghai; Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai; Times Museum, Guangzhou; Nida Art Colony, Lithuania, and the Bleed Biennial in Melbourne, among others. He has contributed to exhibition catalogues for artists such as Elmgreen & Dragset, Ho Rui An, Wang Tuo, and institutions including the Arrow Factory, Beijing, Liverpool Biennial, and Asian Art Biennial, Taichung, among others.

Ari Larissa Heinrich writes about transnational visual cultures, with emphases on the origins of anti-Chinese racism, on medical representations of the body, and on the use of biological materials in art. Ari has also translated key works of queer literature from Taiwan and contributed to queer Sinophone studies. They received a Master’s degree from Harvard University and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and have been supported by grants from the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Australian Research Council (ARC Future Fellowship), the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and others. Ari has lectured on topics ranging from the history of anatomical illustration to the economics of race and racism behind popular exhibitions of Chinese cadavers in internationally circulating anatomical displays. Currently Ari is working on a book about the pigment melanin in the art of Jes Fan, and is co-editor of a recent special issue of Screen Bodies: The Journal of Embodiment, Media Arts, and Technology. Ari is Professor of Chinese Literature and Media at the Australian National University and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Haeju Kim is a Senior Curator at Singapore Art Museum (SAM) who focuses on contemporary art practices in Singapore, Southeast Asia, and Asia. Previously the Deputy Director at Art Sonje Center, Kim holds deep experience in curating numerous contemporary art exhibitions and performance programs across various disciplines. Her curatorial approach emphasizes the consideration of the body, time and memory as key elements, while also engaging with topics including ecological perspectives, locality and its planetary connection, and questions of coexistence through her research. She was the Curator of the Singapore Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, and the Artistic Director for Busan Biennale 2022. Other exhibitions curated by Kim include two solo exhibitions by Shitamichi Motoyuki (A Ship Went Up That Hill, 2022) and Manon de Boer (Down Time, 2022) at Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark, as well as Moving/Image, a three-chapter exhibition and performance program that was presented at Seoul Art Space Mullae (2016), ARKO Art Center (2017) and Seoul Museum of Art (2020).

Nora O’ Murchú is a curator and researcher whose work explores how digital infrastructures—software, algorithms, and networks—reshape contemporary culture and politics. Drawing on queer-feminist and postcapitalist theory, her projects examine how technologies can reinforce extractivist and authoritarian systems, while also revealing cracks for collective action and dissent. She has curated exhibitions, residencies, and public programmes at Akademie Schloss Solitude, LABoral, and the Seoul Museum of Art, and served as Artistic Director of transmediale—Europe’s leading festival for art and digital culture—from 2020 to 2024. Her practice questions the boundaries between art and technology, asking how we might reclaim space for agency and collaboration amid the accelerating reconfigurations of techno-social life and the illusions of technosolutionism. She is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at the University of Limerick, Ireland.

Jenna Rain Warwick is an emerging Artist, Curator and published writer living and working on Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung Country (Melbourne). Born in Mossman, Queensland, a proud Luritja Woman. Jenna’s writing and video practice interrogates the mechanics of image making as it upholds and shapes ‘Australia’ identity. She has an interest in the financing of early Australian film and TV as it relates to industry and natural resource extraction. She seeks to challenge the notion of objectivity and formal modes of research, seeking effective waves to engage her community. She has written for un Projects, Art and Australia, her video work has been shown at ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image), West Space, Incinerator Gallery, Blak Dot Gallery and Counihan Gallery. Until recently she worked as the First Nations curator at ACMI.

 

 

Excerpts from the publication

P. 128
Your work provides a wealth of material for viewers to interpret and debate about. You raise questions, but you don’t insist on a single answer. Personally I know the figures in your work will keep coming back to me. The proximity of violence and sexuality in particular leads me to feel it would be a mistake to assume a lack of emotional complexity in your work (an assumption that I think can be a liability when it comes to interpreting the careful composition of CGI work more generally). Your work isn’t hygienic. It’s messy.

– Excerpt from “Ari Larissa Heinrich in Conversation with Ayoung Kim”

P. 138
“(…) Ernst Mo’s descent into an abyss reveals a stark reality where logistical speed offers only pseudo-revolutions, and neither formal nor grey economies promise a genuine escape from the temporal domination of platform capitalism. To some extent, the free fall of the protagonist from this context might as well suggest a postmortem of her Promethean experiment’s downfall.”

P. 139
“These shifts erode the traditional, feudal model of family resilience and necessitate the formation of new types of solidarity—perhaps akin to a modern-day Thelma and Louise scenario for Ernst Mo and En Storm, a dynamic that could aptly be described as collaborative acceleration.”

– Excerpt from “Can Delivery Dancers Shape That Which Shapes Them? Two Postulations on the Delivery Dancer’s Free Fall Attempts” by Zian Chen

P. 150
“I have watched Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse on my laptop many times. Yet, to this day, the question of the missing time from the work continues to haunt me. Lying outside the central narrative that unfolds between Ernst Mo and En Storm, it caught and held my attention, compelling me to reflect on the external forces that orient my days. In this latest iteration of the Delivery Dancer series, Ayoung Kim draws us toward fragments of time—fractured by the logics of optimization and commodification—and asks whether these broken realities can be reassembled.”

– Excerpt from “A Time Without an Image” by Nora O’ Murchú

P. 191
“The generative AI team was essentially doing invisible labor. It actually occurred to me that prompt labor is a kind of ghost labor, not unlike that of the Delivery Dancers. To me, AI-generation labor is fundamentally care work: it’s babysitting. AI is like a crying child, and the workers are its nannies, soothing and coaxing, rocking back and forth. That’s why I’m trying out this name, “ghost nannies.” AI actually creates a ton of labor for humans, all while its boundless processing speed shows no regard for the slowness of human cognition.”

– Excerpt from “Roundtable: Ghost Nannies or City Planners?” compiled by the Production Team

P. 204
“There is an allure to worlds containing skylines both recognizable and unplaceable, to populations that don’t reckon with historical canon. A tantalizing metamorphosis awaits the protagonist of these worlds, a breaking point induced by the absence of origin. Whilst accelerationism may contextualize the genre Ayoung Kim employs, the ever-present need for care, affection, and understanding of Ernst Mo and En Storm revels against it.”

– Excerpt from “Side-eye Collisions: Navigational Pulls of the Spiritual Kind” by Jenna Rain Warwick

P. 215
“To construct a sequential order or structure open to the possibility of disorder; to anticipate, in other words, scenes in which the mass acquisition and processing of information about (and through) technology may touch upon individual experience, whether by chance or suggestion, sometimes giving way to unpredictable connections and collisions between different pieces of data. Asking how such effects, whether predicted or unforeseen, intersect with the themes and critical questions of each individual piece—not to mention whether they fulfil the artist’s underlying motivation to ‘speak about the nature of the world’—offers one possible way into reading Ayoung Kim’s work”

P. 215
“Here, the protagonists themselves—as agents opening the doors to the future—are, as noted earlier, fluid, invisible, and vulnerable beings. They derive their power from histories and structures that deviate from, or stand outside, contemporary capitalist structures, like myths and ancient cultures. They are transversal figures, moving freely back and forth across interstitial spaces where time and space diverge—agents of disruption who unsettle established systems. “They meet simultaneously in some world, move between the outer and inner worlds, are here, there, and all around.”

– Excerpt from “Imagining Different Movements: Speed, Constellations, Bodies” by Haeju Kim

 

 

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