Ayoung Kim: Body^n | Performa 2025 Biennial | Live Motion Capture Performance
MetaObjects worked with Ayoung Kim and her team on Body^n, a new live motion capture performance for Performa 2025 Biennial in New York with three performances on 13-15 November 2025. MetaObjects supported the game engine development, level design and camera operation during the performances with equipment and production support from Onassis ONX.
About the work
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, 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.
Credits
Presented in partnership with the Samsung Foundation of Culture
Co-produced by @onassis.onx @canyon.ny
Supported by Arts Council Korea, SBS Foundation, and Performa Commissioning Council members Yana Peel @yanapeel and Bilge OgutCumbusyan & Haro Cumbusyan.
Performa Team
@roseleegoldberg
@defneayas___ Senior Curator-at-Large
josefinabarcia Hartwig Art Foundation Curatorial Fellow
@esanickle Managing Director and Executive Producer
@soapboxdarby Producer
@andreas0312 Associate Producer
Special thanks to Ikechúkwú Onyewuenyi, Curator and Manager of Curatorial Affairs.
CAST
Chai Kim @chai_action as Ernst Mo
Hyesook Kim @k_i_m_h_y_e_s_u_k as En Storm
Kimie Parker @kimieparker and Jenny Gao @goodtogao as Shadow Dancers
Writer and Director @ayoung___kim
Studio Producer: @yenaku
Ayoung Kim Studio: @k_cong Soyeon @soyeon.song01 @rijin_yoo Haein Kim
Producer (Seoul): @channel.crane
Studio Tech Manager: @k_cong
On-site Rehearsal Assistance (Seoul): @woow_woo
Action Choreographer (Best Action Team): @chai_action
Supporting Role Stand-ins (Seoul): @muzzin._.eozzin @so.1_jeongyeon
Consulting Choreographer: @shh_works and @mmmlloyd
Advisory: Jaelee Kim and @srunderbaryoon
Lighting Design: @gumgum.studio
Operating Support (Seoul): @janghan_homemade
Research Support: @parkdamie @seossing_
Production Assistance: @ceejaeyu
Game Engine Development: MetaObjects (Andrew Crowe)
Game Engine Technical Art, Level Design, & Technical Camera Operator (NY & Seoul): @kimiyaong and MetaObjects
EMP Studio: Motion Capture Studio (Seoul Rehearsal)
Music, Sound Mixing & Mastering: Đ.K. (aka Dang Khoa Chau) @worship_prod
Show Operator (NY): @astro_sh_lee
Costume Design: @hardworkup
Motion Capture Suit Customization: @need_a_haven
Video Editing, VFX, Color Grading: @moody_hyunji Ayoung Kim
Thanks to Ilran Kim, Soyong Shin, Eriko Jimbo, Babou Sanneh, Sungwon Kim, and Art Hub Copenhagen.
With deep gratitude to Seokyung Jang @s____jang