Ayoung Kim: Synthetic Storyteller
Language: Korean, English
Publication Date: January 2024
Pages: softcover, 440 pages, color illustrations, black and white, 112 x 183 mm
ISBN: 979-11-985617-0-1 (93600)
Publisher: The Floorplan, Seoul
Authors: Nanna Heidenreich, Chien-Hung Huang, Jinshil Lee, Ayoung Kim, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Wonhwa Yoon
Translators: Minji Chun, Alan Dai, Collin Mouat, Soyoon Ryu
English Editor: Gye Taek Gon (James Gui)
Korean Editor: Hyunjoo Byeon
Assistant Editor & Archivist: Myunghee Kim, Dayun Ryu
Design: Shin Shin
3D Image: Hyebin Kim

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국립현대미술관 미술책방

서울시립미술관 더레퍼런스

Contents

1. Interview with Ayoung Kim
2. The Labyrinth of the Free World – Wonhwa Yoon
3. The nth Possible World of Speculative Feminism – Porosity Valley – Jinshil Lee
4. In Search of Petra Genetrix – Ayoung Kim
5. Delivery Dancer’s Sphere: A Many-Worlds Pandemic Fiction – Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
6. Technès Politics in Porous-Ecosystem – Chien-Hung Huang
7. Techno-Orientalism: Beyond an Asia of Fascination, Fear, and Phobia – Ayoung Kim
8. Intersecting Narratives. Thinking with Ayoung Kim’s work – Nanna Heidenreich
9. Biographies
10. List of Artworks

The Floorplan is pleased to announce the publication of Ayoung Kim: Synthetic Storyteller, the most comprehensive monograph encompassing the artist’s practice. Visual and media artist 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 (VR), game simulation, sonic fiction, diagrams and texts.
As the hitherto most extensive introduction to the artist’s work, this monograph presents a selection of artworks produced between 2007 and 2022 through still images and installation views together with several critical voices. It includes Ayoung Kim’s text and scripts from various projects which are the foundation of her work, an interview with curator Hyunjoo Byeon, accompanied by analytical essay contributions from Nanna Heidenreich, Chien-Hung Huang, Jinshil Lee, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein and Wonhwa Yoon.
Ayoung Kim is a recipient of the Golden Nica Award, Prix Ars Electronica, Austria (2023); Terayama Shuji Prize, 37th Image Forum Festival, Japan (2023); a finalist of the Korea Artist Prize, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (2019); and a recipient of the Young Artist of the Year Award, Ministry of Culture, Korea (2015). She has presented solo and group exhibitions and projects worldwide at the Sharjah Biennial (2023); Ars Electronica Festival, Linz (2023); HEK (House of Electronic Arts), Basel (2023); International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) (2023), CPH:DOX Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (2023); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul and Gwacheon (2023, 2022, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016); Kuandu Biennial, Taipei (2022); Asian Art Biennial, Taichung (2021); Videobrasil, São Paulo (2021); Berlin International Film Festival (2020); Busan Biennale (2020); Gwangju Biennale (2018), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016); and the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), among others. (The Floorplan)

This book is published with the support of the “2023 ARKO Selection Visual Art.”

Excerpts from the publication

P. 35
“In a hybrid space where the boundaries between human beings, machines and objects are left ambiguous, we see a cold dice game unfold, where the survivors, victims and missing are determined by chance. Ayoung Kim’s protagonists tend to take life-or-death gambles as they resist their given conditions; their success rate is, on the whole, not high. Regardless of how much of that is historical destiny and how much of it is free will, the escape attempts do ultimately contribute to mutations and renewals in the world.”

– Excerpt from the essay The Labyrinth of the Free World by Wonhwa Yoon

P. 47
“A story always takes place through the act (or relationship) of storytelling. The process of its transmission – listening to the story, brewing it with the listener’s own memories, and, telling it again, retransmitting it – takes place like a chain reaction. The process is far from homogenous, however; it is rather an interconnected and variable matrix. (…) Here, Kim urges speculative fiction to ‘actively speculate and simulate the alternative future, or the possible world, to embody reality.’ Through it, speculative fiction becomes a ‘tool of possibility, which enables various racial, socio-economic, and gender minorities to imagine a different present and future.’

– Excerpt from the essay The nth Possible World of Speculative Feminism – Porosity Valley by Jinshil Lee

P. 81
“The physical world of Delivery Dancer’s Sphere is not a perfect reflection of our own, but instead an exaggerated one where the magnification highlights the journeys and humanity of invisible, essential workers. To illuminate the social structures that govern the lives of people like Ernst Mo, Kim successfully evokes fundamental ideas from across physics: the relativity of time, quantum entanglement, symmetry and symmetry breaking, the uncertainty principle and variations on the stationary-action principle.

– Excerpt from the essay Delivery Dancer’s Sphere: A Many-Worlds Pandemic Fiction by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

P.112
“Kim’s artistic creations and thought continuously return to the different plights of and paths forward for ‘human beings’. As AI and cybernetic technology brings in more species and mechanical interfaces into dialogue about the future of humankind, we can say that the artistic power of Kim has ‘arranged’ (agencé) the temporal convergence of AI, cybernetics, streaming persons and artists: the post-pandemic moment of technès politics.”

– Excerpt from the essay Technès Politics in Porous-Ecosystem by Chien-Hung Huang

P.135
“The media specificity of each of Kim’s works thus has an uncanny way of projecting into the future of her projects – resonances form between each choice of medium beyond connections in content. Ayoung Kim’s focus encompasses ‘geopolitics, transposition, transnational movements, speculative storytelling, narrativity, worldbuilding, mythopoetics, and so on.’ This is where the narratives intersect (the ones she collects and the ones she composes); this is what Ayoung Kim is working on, how she works: she creates synthesis, or what she calls ‘synthetic stories’.”

– Excerpt from the essay Intersecting Narratives. Thinking with Ayoung Kim’s Work by Nanna Heidenreich

Artist

In her multifaceted practice, Ayoung Kim synthesizes the outcomes of far-reaching speculation, establishing connections between biopolitics and border controls, the memories of stones and virtual memories, and ancestral origins and imminent futures. These narratives take the forms of video, moving image, VR, game simulation, sonic fiction, diagrams, and texts that the artist presents as exhibitions, screenings, performances, and publications. Kim decisively integrates geopolitics, mythology, technology, and futuristic iconography in her work, and she retroactively seeks speculative time to infiltrate the present.
Ayoung Kim has presented her work at the Sharjah Biennial 15 (2023), Ars Electronica Festival, Linz (2023); HEK (House of Electronic Arts), Basel (2023); IFFR International Film Festival Rotterdam (2023); CPH:DOX Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (2023); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul and Gwacheon (2023, 2022, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016); Kuandu Biennial, Taipei (2022); Asian Art Biennial, Taichung (2021); Videobrasil, São Paulo (2021); Berlin International Film Festival (2020); Busan Biennale (2020); Gwangju Biennale (2018); Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul (2018); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016); and the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), among others.
Kim is a recipient of the Golden Nica Award, Prix Ars Electronica, Austria (2023), Terayama Shuji Prize, 37th Image Forum Festival, Japan (2023), Best Film Award, Chuncheon SF Film Festival, Korea (2020), a finalist of the Korea Artist Prize, MMCA (2019), and a recipient of the Young Artist of the Year Award, Ministry of Culture, Korea (2015).
Her work is included in the collections of the Tate, UK; Frac Lorraine, France; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; Kadist Foundation, San Francisco; Simon Lee Foundation Institute of Contemporary Asian Art at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; MMCA, Korea; Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul; Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul; Busan Museum of Art, Busan; Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, Busan; and Joaquim Paiva Collection at Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro, among others.

Authors

Dr. Nanna Heidenreich is a media & cultural studies scholar with a focus on critical migration studies and postcolonial media theory and is currently a professor of Transcultural Studies at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. She is also a curator with decades of experience in film/video art and political and theoretical interventions. As such she has worked, among others, with Forum Expanded/International Filmfestival Berlin (Berlinale), HKW (Berlin), ADKDW (Cologne) and Kunstraum D21 (Leipzig). Her recent publications include Spectacle and Space of Possibility. Art and the Long Summer of Migration (2022) and the anthologies fAKE hYBRID sITES pALIMPSEST: Essays on Leakages (2021) and Tidal Thinking. Research beyond the nation-state system (2019). Her current research projects focus on the discourse on invasive species and ways of thinking about ecologies as well as age (rage) as a queer-feminist arena. She lives in Berlin and Vienna.

 
Dr. Chien-Hung Huang finished his Ph.D. studies in Paris 8 under the direction of Jacques Rancière, focusing on the relationship between politics and images. He became a professor at the Taipei National University of Arts in the Institute of Trans-disciplinary Art, and the director of the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (2019-). He has published numerous books, including COQ (2009), An Independent Discourse (2010), Trans-Plex Agenda (2011), EMU (2012), Smile of Montage (2013), Fragments of Para-Colonial (2019) and Demo-Art: Dis-paracolonization under Homophonic Process (2023). Huang is also a film critic and a critic of contemporary art and the spectacle. He has translated books by G. Deleuze, J. Baudrillard and J. Rancière. Since 2007, he has been also working as a curator and his research contributes to post-colonial studies, global curating methods, thoughts and image theories. Recent his curated shows include Trans-Archiving (2017), Trans-Justice: Paracolonial@technology (2018), Co/Inspiration in Catastrophe (2019), May Co-Sensus: Demo-Stream in Democratizations, MaytoDay (2020), Demo-Art: Cultural Plasticizing Movement N.0 in Taiwan Now (2021), Touch of Games: Francis Alÿs Solo Show (2022) and Wild 80’s: Dawn of a Transdisciplinary Taiwan (2022).

 
Jinshil Lee is a critic and curator, researching significant art praxis in visual art and media, after postgraduate study in German aesthetics and art theory at Seoul National University. She is also a member of Ágrafa Society, a curatorial & editorial collective that produces text and its performativity in the perspective of feminism, queer and more unknown others.

 
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an associate professor of physics and astronomy and core faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is a theoretical physicist and Black feminist theorist whose first book The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred is available in Korean as 『나의 사랑스럽고 불평등한 코스모스: 흑인 에이젠더 여성 물리학자의 과학은 늘 차별과 중첩된다』 from Humanist Publishing Group.

 
Wonhwa Yoon is an independent researcher, art writer, and translator based in Seoul. She is interested in using the exhibition space as a laboratory, observing a temporality generated by the interaction of bodies, images, and physical environment to remake the shape of history at work in the present. Yoon is the author of A Tale of Shells, or On the Incompleteness of Art and On the Thousand and Second Night: Visual Arts in Seoul in the 2010s (both published in Korean), and translated Friedrich Kittler, Reza Negarestani, and others into Korean. She also edited the online journal As the Ground Heaves for the Busan Biennale 2022, and co-produced Soft Places for the 10th Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2018.

The Floorplan is an art platform without physical space. It presents exhibitions, projects and publishes art books to vary established art practices. Originally used in architecture and building engineering to mean the layout of a structure from above, the term ‘floor plan’ generally means a map or guide of an exhibition indicating the artworks on display when used in an artistic context. The Floorplan aims to function as a guide to present diversity in contemporary art and to map out a new way to institutionalize contemporary art. By naming itself after a term used to signify physical and tangible space, it reconsiders the meaning of space in contemporary art and seeks possibilities of solidarity beyond the parameters of time and space in the ways in which it plays with the concept of platform, and ultimately attempts to investigate the ways to vary established artistic practices. Furthermore, the Floorplan approaches contemporary art as global content which is not restricted by its origin while also considering the significance of locality. All the content on the website will be written in both English and Korean.