Kinetics of the Posthuman Body: An Interview with Ayoung Kim and Kim Cha-I

Projected for the first time on the M+ Facade over Victoria Harbour, Ayoung Kim’s Dancer in the Mirror Field transforms the building into a large-scale canvas. The work had to function as a visual environment visible from afar, engaging a broad audience without relying on dialogue.

Drawing from the choreography of classic Hong Kong action cinema—such as Jackie Chan’s Police Story (1985)—and the fluid, posthuman dynamism of Peter Chung’s Æon Flux (1991–1995), Kim constructs a speculative world where a delivery service platform stages an annual dance competition to crown the performer with the most optimised movements. The project continues Kim’s Delivery Dancer series, exploring how performance, repetition, and simulation form bodily agency under technological and economic pressures.

Kim explains: ‘Seeing it projected at this scale over the harbour was surreal. It’s my first project for a media façade, which is very different from exhibitions or cinema. I created an image-driven environment readable from a distance, purely based on visual language. Production used CGI, motion capture, game engines, and AI-generated imagery, bringing together intuitive choreography with computational logic.’

Central to the work is the collaboration with Kim Cha-I, martial arts director and stunt performer, whose choreography brings the energy of Hong Kong action cinema, particularly rare female-to-female sequences, into the film. Together, their collaboration fuses cinematic choreography, motion capture, and digital technologies to create a dense, layered, and immersive experience.

The following conversation is an extract covering the conceptual and technical dimensions of Dancer in the Mirror Field, with Kim discussing her creative process, technological experimentation, and collaborative approach alongside Cha-I, moderated by Sunny Cheung, Curator of Design and Architecture, M+.

Sunny Cheung: Let’s kick off this conversation with the plot. Could you talk a little about the four guardians in the film, what they represent, and why one of them is located outside the mall?

Ayoung Kim: These four guardians are obvious references to traditional navigation in Asia, constellations, and directional systems. The entire mall is overlooked by four statues: the Azure Dragon of the East, the White Tiger of the West, the Black Turtle of the North, and the Vermilion Bird of the South. The task given to them by the mysterious entity called ‘the beacon’ focuses on directionality. I wanted to reference this in a distinctly Asian logic.

In the mall sequence, the Black Turtle isn’t visible. It’s located elsewhere in the Hong Kong street environment. This choice gives the sequence more narrative and storytelling power, creating a sense that the guardians operate across a broader spatial and symbolic landscape.

Sunny: You mentioned the influence of Æon Flux, but there are also references to films like The Matrix, which younger audiences may not be familiar with. While the aesthetic comes from the 1990s, we’ve seen a recent revival of these styles. What do you think about this resurgence? Does it relate to entering an AI era? And would you classify your series as dystopian, or perhaps utopian, or neither?

Ayoung: I actually don’t have a clear judgement about the future of cities and technology. Technology is growing autonomously, and everyone is influenced by it. The more it advances, the more people are excluded from understanding its functions. Only big tech companies know what’s happening inside the ‘black box’.

This also relates to nostalgia. I once read Simon Reynolds’s Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, where he worried that future generations will have everything archived in full HD or 4K. Our past is entirely preserved, and now AI can even generate nostalgic images. Things that were once meant to be forgotten are now completely visible, as if made today. The past, present, and future become anachronistically entangled, and young people struggle to imagine their own vision of the present or future. That’s why they often draw from archival materials and historical layers. It’s convenient, but it’s also a kind of creative shortcut.

Recently, I’ve seen many influencers creating AI-generated images and videos imagining the 1980s and 1990s. Many are young creators whose idea of the 1980s and 1990s feels closer to the 1950s or 1960s. They don’t have a true sense of the past. Some even comment things like, ‘In the 1980s, there were no elevators!’—it’s super funny, but it shows the disconnection.

Sunny: I’m also curious about the architecture in this project. During the research and development phase last year, how do you think Hong Kong compares as a city to Seoul? How does the urban environment influence your world-building?

Ayoung: In the second sequence, the video moves through the Hong Kong landscape. Hong Kong has always been a fantasy city for many, especially its 1990s and early 2000s landscape, which was still full of neon signs before many were removed. It was hyper-futuristic, cyberpunk, and attracted attention from all over the world. Hong Kong was also the most depicted city in Hollywood cinema when discussing techno-orientalism.

I used to be captivated by these Western depictions of Asia. They were beautifully rendered with neon lights, layered mysteries, and visually striking urban textures. But as I grew older, I questioned the agency of ‘Asianness’ in these depictions. Asian characters often appeared only as backdrop or folding screens, eliminated at the start of the story. They were never protagonists.

This nature of techno-orientalism, using Asia just as a backdrop, felt problematic. It pushed me to imagine Asian futures from the perspective of an Asian agency. My recent projects deal with Asian futurism, but I must admit, I was super fascinated by the Hong Kong landscape.

Sunny: Before we move on to Cha-I, I want to discuss your work with objects from the Powerhouse Museum. Can you talk about the decision process behind incorporating certain objects into your work, and how your discussions with [Powerhouse exhibition curator] Cara Stewart might have differed from ours?

Ayoung: Working with the museum collections was incredibly helpful and meaningful. Normally, it’s difficult to access valuable 3D-scanned or 3D-modeled objects for our video works, so having these digital assets to embed in the world was amazing. We always lack the digital assets to enrich our environments, so this was a rare opportunity.

Powerhouse suggested a list of objects, and we reselected about 20–30 items. They scanned them with a 3D scanner, and we also incorporated funky techno and rave festival posters that fit the landscape and story. We even included iconic artworks like Zaha Hadid’s pieces—artwork within artwork!

Finally, this sequence also features the bamboo scaffolding, which involves acrobatic movements performed by the actor with wire assistance, adding a layer of physicality and dynamism to the choreography.

Sunny: Perhaps this is a good segue to speak with Cha-I. Could you talk about the specific Hong Kong action scenes in the film? For example, Long Arm of the Law (1984), Police Story (1985), and other classics. Did you grow up watching Hong Kong action cinema, and how did it influence you?

Cha-I Kim: I really love action movies, especially Hong Kong films from the 1990s. I have actually watched almost all of the classics you can name. But it’s not just the action movies, I love all Hong Kong cinema. I was so obsessed with the culture that even driving, I’d listen to Faye Wong’s songs.

When I was in secondary school, I even asked my mom if I could go to the Shaolin Monastery to learn kung fu. She said I could only go if I learned Chinese perfectly… which I didn’t. But that’s how passionate I was. When Ayoung gave me reference videos from Hong Kong films, I had already seen them all and knew exactly the feeling she wanted, especially for the police movies. Using motion capture, we were able to capture all the emotions precisely.

I feel very lucky to have collaborated with Ayoung to create something unique. Of course, she might have some regrets, but I’m just so grateful. We really brought the vision to life together.

Sunny: Were there any movements captured from other films that didn’t make it into the final edit, or was everything used?

Ayoung: We captured hundreds of movements and actions, so the majority weren’t used. There’s a whole repository we can draw from for future projects. For this sequence on the M+ Facade, we deliberately slowed the action sequences, roughly half speed, because if it were too fast, it would feel dizzying for a general audience.

Sunny: Cha-I, how does working in film, where what you see is what you get, differ from working with game engines and motion capture? What are the limitations and possibilities?

Cha-I: The biggest difference is the possibilities it brings. In movies and dramas, we aim for realism, but there are cultural limitations. For example, in South Korea, gun scenes aren’t common, so films with them don’t gain much attention. Martial arts sequences also don’t carry the same weight as they do in Hong Kong cinema.

With motion capture, everything changes. There are no limits, no rules, and no nationality differences. It opens a door to endless possibilities for movement, choreography, and creativity.

Sunny: Ayoung, you mentioned wanting to highlight female-to-female action sequences, partly because they’re so rare in mainstream cinema. But lately, Hollywood has seen a resurgence of films with strong female leads—Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), where Charlize Theron clearly dominates over Tom Hardy’s character, Salt (2010), Black Widow (2021), and Ballerina (2025). How does that shift fit into what you’re doing?

Ayoung: I’d like to hear Cha-I’s perspective first.

Cha-I: Even with these films, there’s still a gap. When two women fight on screen, it’s unusual, and that’s what makes it so fascinating. With male fights, power and physicality are expected. You know what the momentum will look like. But with women, the same moves convey something entirely different. The energy, the force, the timing. It’s surprising, eye-opening, almost like opening a box and discovering something new.

Ayoung: Exactly. There’s a lot of entrenched stereotyping in female action, especially in Korea. Male action directors often default to clichés: ponytail grabs, exaggerated spins, and over-the-top gestures that flatten the potential of female performance. Working with Cha-I, we could explore beyond those biases, discovering the full expressiveness of the female body. Some of the movements in Dancer in the Mirror Field came out of moments that neither of us expected. They were spontaneous, inventive, and powerful.

Cha-I: Indeed, choreographing female fights opens up new possibilities. You start to see strength and agility differently, and it does not have to mimic male power to be impactful. There is a subtlety, a flow, and a precision unique to female movement, and it is exhilarating to capture.

Sunny: So now the emerging ‘stereotype’ in action films is this high-flying, acrobatic style: running, flipping, spinning, and taking down the opponent in a fluid sequence.

Ayoung: (laughs) That is actually quite advanced, and it shows how much more potential there is for rethinking female action. With Cha-I, we can move beyond clichés into something that feels alive, unpredictable, and fully realised.

Sunny: One last question, Ayoung. This is your first full film created with game engines rather than live action. Looking ahead, what technologies are you looking for?

Ayoung: There are so many emerging technologies, it’s hard to keep track. Recently, OpenAI released Sora 2, a video-generation tool trained on video instead of just images. It can create entire 3D environments in real time from text prompts, shifting aesthetics from cyberpunk to nostalgia or classic film. No modelling, no game engine; it literally generates everything.

In contemporary art, we often explore technologies critically, testing their hidden possibilities and not only using them ‘as intended’. Tools like Sora 2 open new ways to play, experiment, and imagine what’s possible.

In the end, Dancer in the Mirror Field invites us to reconsider how bodies move, act, and assert agency within systems of optimisation and digital environments. By bringing together cinematic choreography, computational tools, and speculative narratives, Kim questions what movement can express and also how we experience and interpret it in the context of late-stage (techno)capitalism. What new forms of embodiment, power, and imagination might emerge when our motions are both human and computational?