In an abandoned Asian shopping mall—labyrinthine, ruinous—three figures are chasing each other. The space feels at once desolate and frenetic: motorbikes drift mid-air, consumer goods float around, and a massive golden clock dominates a wall. The figures, identical except for their movements, wear helmets that hide their faces. At one point, when they leap onto the clock’s hour hands mid-battle, it is unclear whether they are engaged in heated combat or choreography. This is a scene in Korean artist Ayoung Kim’s latest M+ façade commission, Dancer in the Mirror Field (2025), which screens from October 3 to December 28 in Hong Kong. The story features Ernst Mo (her name an anagram of “monster”), who has split into three versions of herself, all vying for the coveted title “Dancer of the Year” in a mysterious delivery platform’s annual contest. Ernst Mo has been the protagonist in Kim’s work for three years, moving through semi-virtual Seoul streets and now into this iteration inspired by Hong Kong’s urban memory and neon-lit action cinema of the 1980s and ‘90s.

2025 has been a remarkable year for Kim. Following last year’s ACC Future Prize, she received the LG Guggenheim Award in February, opened her first European solo exhibition at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof in the same month, and is currently preparing for her upcoming show at MoMA PS1 in New York, while also participating in this year’s Performa Biennial. I met Kim in the screening room of M+ museum, just ahead of the unveiling of her façade commission.