Kim’s “Delivery Dancer” series includes Ghost Dancers A (2022), Ghost Dancers B (2022), Delivery Dancer Simulation (2022), Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (2022), and Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0º Receiver (2024). Central to these works are two female delivery drivers, framed by the artist as delivery dancers—Ernst Mo and En Storm—who traverse the city and slip through dimensional rifts. Their names are anagrams of “Monster.” Blending live-action footage, CGI, and generative AI, Kim crafts a contemporary fable that interrogates women’s bodies, algorithmic governance, and the urban future. In Kim’s world, time is not a backdrop but a material to be twisted, stretched, and bent. ¹The delivery platform “Dance Master” is an algorithmic dispatch system that choreographs its delivery dancers with precision. Through rankings, scores, and leaderboard competition, it slices their time into hyper-measured units. Time is a currency…time is the enemy.² To survive, the delivery dancers must sprint endlessly, constantly optimizing speed and efficiency, as if trapped in an infinite, level-based game.

Kim notes that her conception of multiple worlds is shaped by the tradition of speculative fiction. From this perspective, her creative trajectory may be seen as converging with the methodology of African American writer Octavia E. Butler, who employs “extrapolating from reality” in her writing. Butler's works often extend imaginative explorations of race, gender, genetics, and power through richly allegorical social settings. Kim’s methodology echoes this approach: rather than constructing a flashy sci-fi universe, she projects the conditions already shaping life in Seoul—gig-work, algorithmic manipulation, and women’s embodied vulnerabilities—into a prophetic horizon. Viewers gradually come to realize that this is not a crisis of fiction, but one that is closing in on us.

By naming her protagonists after anagrams of “Monster,” Kim signals that although these women are alienated laborers within the system, they also operate as its potential glitches—fissures through which a new order might emerge. As two mutant variants of the Monster, Ernst Mo and En Storm reflect and oppose one another. They do not embody a stable self, but a cyborg subjectivity that drifts across multiple worlds, marked by fracture and possibility. ¹In their monstrous guise, they resist algorithmic control and strive to articulate alternative logics of existence. Kim’s vision resonates with the evolving figure of the female cyborg in East Asia, creating a dialogue that spans media and generations.

Since the mid-1990s, Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell has stood as one of the most iconic female cyborgs. Her original human body has nearly vanished; aside from her consciousness, every limb and organ—including the casing of her brain—is artificially constructed. Her cybernetic shell grants superhuman strength, capable of confronting armored vehicles head-on, and can be repaired, upgraded, and continually iterated like a piece of machinery. Yet this heavily militarized cyborg is rendered in a hyper-sexualized, idealized female form: tall, sculpted, and voluptuous, often appearing nearly nude, catering to the projections of the male gaze. Motoko embodies a paradox: cyborgization can empower women, yet their bodies remain trapped within regimes of systemic control, discipline, and spectacle.

Kim has also noted that when she experiments with generating female figures through AI, the models sometimes “spits out some quite unpleasant, biased images of Asian women” shaped by an “Asian fetish.” ¹This experience reinforced her conviction that the Asian female cyborgs she creates must resist exoticization and instead reflect the real labor precarity faced by Asian women. Unlike Motoko, Ernst Mo and En Storm do not possess sleek, eroticized bodies. Their outfits—positioned between courier uniform and flight suit—are deliberately de-sexualized, with joint-like protective structures that anchor their subjectivity firmly within a laboring framework, explicitly rejecting the risk of being aestheticized as objects of desire.

Notably, a new generation of Korean women sci-fi writers—such as Kim Cho-yeop and Cheon Seon-ran—has begun to weave Asian female cyborg narratives into everyday life. Their imagined futures are no longer driven by militarized conflict or apocalyptic survival, but pivot toward the intimate dramas of family relations and emotional entanglements. The story “Lola” included in Kim Cho-yeop’s short story collection The World I Just Left exemplifies this shift: the protagonist, Lola, often experiences intense phantom limb pain from a nonexistent third arm following a car accident. After undergoing virtual reality therapy, the pain subsides, but Lola finds the sensation of having a third arm has become even stronger. Consequently, she resolves to have a mechanical arm installed. Her partner Jean cannot grasp why Lora would modify her body for a limb that does not exist, while for Lora, remaking her body is the only path back to herself. The cold, gasoline-scented mechanical arm becomes both an external prosthesis and a literalized emotional fissure. In Kim Cho-yeop’s narrative, the cyborg functions as an emotional apparatus, registering human bewilderment and pain under conditions of modern alienation. Here, the cyborg female body serves as a medium for contemplating love and otherness: if love entails embracing an other who cannot be fully understood, then the cyborg embodies the inevitable impossibility of ever truly knowing another.

If Kim Cho-yeop’s “Lora” frames phantom limb pain through a technological lens, artist Wang Ximan brings it back to the material realities of bodily trauma and repair. In her performance As If It Suggests Its Own Corrections (2024), Wang transforms her body into a cyborg testing ground: to affix a mock cast onto her “intact” right leg, she drives steel needles through layers of plaster into her calf, while simultaneously removing the actual prosthesis from her “damaged” left leg. Rather than using prosthetics to extend or enhance the body, Wang keeps body and apparatus in a state of perpetual, unfinished negotiation. Pain becomes a central material of the work—phantom limbs are no longer neurological illusions but a lived experience of ongoing gaps and failures. Her practice mounts a critique of the very notion of a complete body.

Looking back, the figure of the female cyborg has been continually reimagined in the practices of Asian women artists. One early and emblematic example is Atsuko Tanaka’s Electric Dress (1956). Composed of wires, a control console, and roughly two hundred lightbulbs, the garment illuminates when powered, transforming the artist’s body into a radiant circuitry. Visually, Tanaka appears both as a conduit subject to electric currents and technological control, and as the glowing center of energy and action. The work thus foregrounds the complex position of the female body within systems of technology and power.

Tanaka’s Electric Dress, created in the 1950s, emerged amid Japan’s postwar reconstruction and the early wave of industrialization. Electronics and household appliances entered daily life as icons of modernity; technological progress was hailed as the nation’s promise of revival, yet it also reinforced entrenched gender roles. Japanese women were expected to become modern housewives in electrified homes, serving as the interface between machines and domestic labor. It was within this context that Electric Dress came into being. Tanaka draped her body in a garment densely threaded with wires, deliberately inserting herself into the technological system—both a body to be connected and deployed, and a subject that conducts electricity and radiates light. This dual positioning exposes the paradoxical condition of women in a technological society: disciplined and constrained by technology, yet simultaneously discovering new forms of agency within it. In this sense, Electric Dress not only anticipates the emergence of the female cyborg imagery but also opens a space to reflect on how women’s bodies are electrified and instrumentalized in the process of modernization.

Born in GuangZhou in 1978, Cao Fei came of age alongside China’s Reform and Opening Up and its meteoric economic rise. Her film Asia One (2018) turns its gaze toward the highly automated world of logistics. Shot in JD Logistics’ “Asia One” warehouse and sorting center, this sci-fi–tinged narrative imagines a near-future allegorical love story. In the film, workers and couriers are not only tightly monitored and coordinated by robots, but even their emotional states are tracked and modulated by an AI scoring system. The film presents a stark, post-human industrial space: parcels glide efficiently along conveyor belts, workers’ wrists bear standardized barcodes, and human emotions and desires are subsumed into algorithmic logic—yet subtle misalignments and acts of resistance quietly emerge within the cracks.

Asia One embeds narratives of love and affect into this hyper-automated environment, transforming bodies and intimate relations into sites of resistance against technological alienation. The work compels viewers to ask: in labor systems deeply entwined with algorithmic logic and AI, how can humans continue to feel, and sustain intimacy and connection? Cao Fei’s reflections on the paradoxes of emotion and technology resonate with Ayoung Kim’s contemplation of the gig economy and algorithmic governance in her “Delivery Dancer” series.

Korean artist Geumhyung Jeong’s work focuses on a more microscopic and concrete level, exploring the interplay between the human body and mechanical parts, and situating the human–machine relationship in the realm of touch and physical dynamics. In her 2024 solo exhibition “Under Construction,” she assembles uncanny “skeletal machines” from DIY mechanical components and complete human skeletons, and engages with them through choreography-like performances. These movements sometimes resemble construction, sometimes dismantling, and sometimes ongoing maintenance. Jeong highlights the ambiguous space between machines and the human body: through mutual adjustment and care, they entwine and dance together, opening up new possibilities.

Whether it is Tanaka’s luminous moment of the female body wired into a circuit, Cao Fei’s allegorical love story unfolding within logistics chains, Geumhyung Jeong’s inventive choreography with mechanical skeletons, or Ayoung Kim’s delivery dancers resisting algorithmic governance—these artistic practices demonstrate that science fiction is not an escape from reality, but a tool for critically engaging with it. In the hands of these women artists, science fiction becomes an experimental terrain. Through fictional constructs and heterotopian scenarios, they push power structures, technological logics, and gender politics to their limits, and from the resulting cracks and misalignments, they imagine new possibilities. The female body is no longer merely an object of gaze and discipline—it emerges as a subject capable of generating energy and affect. Science fiction functions as a creative strategy, allowing women artists to rewrite the politics of the body, probe the boundaries of identity, and expand our imagination of intimacy and belonging. (Editor: Ara Yun Qiu; Translator: Yi Yu)