Delivery Dancer's Arc: Inverse

Delivery Dancer's Arc: Inverse is the exhibition catalogue for Ayoung Kim's solo show at the National Asian Culture Center in Gwangju, the inaugural presentation of the ACC Future Prize, on view August 2024 through February 2025.

The exhibition continues Kim's Delivery Dancer series. It follows two protagonists, Ernst Mo and En Storm, from a virtual Seoul into a new virtual city built around lost and forgotten calendars and timekeeping systems. Kim treats the Gregorian calendar's rise to global standard as an effect of imperialism and modernization, and sets against it the cosmologies and time-systems other cultures lost along the way. The title's "Arc" points to the curved lines of sundials and calendar plates that recur through the work, tracing timelines and connecting space, history, and the body. "Inverse" names time's inverse relationship to speed, and the idea that other times and spaces persist inside the gaps left by constant competition. The book runs 228 pages in paperback with 150 color images.

Kim is a Seoul-based artist. Since 2017 her work has built speculative, hybrid narratives out of migration, capitalism, and state ideology, mixing archaeology, futurism, and science fiction, increasingly in collaboration with AI systems. The ACC Future Prize recognizes artists working at this kind of interdisciplinary edge, and this catalogue extends the project she began with Delivery Dancer's Arc.