Ayoung Kim works across video, moving images, virtual reality, game simulation, performance, sound, and text. Combining speculative fiction with historical fact, geopolitics, and myth, her practice connects distant geographies and timescales. 

Al-Mather Plot 1991 centres on Riyadh’s Al-Mather Housing Complex, built by the Korean Hanyang Corporation during a surge of South Korean labour migration to the Gulf region. Intended as a major residential development, it remained uninhabited until the outbreak of the Gulf War, when it became a refuge for displaced Kuwaitis. Weaving together the geopolitics of oil with her father’s experience as a migrant Korean worker in the region, Kim constructs a layered portrait of the complex as a site where migration, war, petro-capitalism, and personal memory sediment into one another. 

Through live-action footage, generative AI, game engine animation, archival photographs, and field recordings gathered over a decade of research, the film digitally reassembles fragments of history and memory, in which oil is never merely an economic force but an ancestral tissue connecting nations, bodies, and histories.