The Soft Geometry of Being: An Evening with LG Guggenheim Award Recipient Ayoung Kim

Step into a world where the virtual meets the real in this special after-hours program with Ayoung Kim, recipient of the 2025 LG Guggenheim Award. Join Kim as she unveils her approach to image and character creation, forging unexpected connections across presence, narrative, and mediated form. 

Kim activates the iconic Frank Lloyd Wright–designed theater with a cast of virtual and live entities in this experimental artist talk. Unfolding in real time across both physical and digital realms, this hybrid presentation brings to life the digitally embodied figures from her recent works—most notably Ernest Mo and En Storm—each marked by a distinctive personality and a replicated visual form. 

Conceived specifically for the Guggenheim’s theater, this technology-driven experience —using LG OLED technology— blurs the lines between subject and object, simulation and reference, and spectacle and process.  

When: Tuesday, July 1, 2025  

6:30–7:30 pm 

Where: Guggenheim New York: Peter B. Lewis Theater 

1071 Fifth Avenue 

New York, NY 10128

Who: Ayoung Kim (b. 1979) is an artist based in Seoul, South Korea, and the recipient of the 2025 LG Guggenheim Award. Trained in motion graphics and lens-based media, Kim creates fantastical, meticulously crafted virtual environments using emerging technologies. Her work builds on classical cinematic tropes, combining live action, motion capture and animation software, game engines, and image-generation technologies. She explores virtual reality and live simulation alongside more traditional mediums like performance, sculpture, and printmaking. 

Tickets: $25 general, $20 members, $15 students; Purchase tickets here.   

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About the LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Initiative
The LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Initiative is a five-year, multifaceted collaboration between the Guggenheim and LG designed to research, honor, and promote artists working at the intersection of art and technology. Unique in its areas of concentration and approach, the initiative is an unprecedented investment in technology as an artistic medium. It enables the Guggenheim to broaden its investigations into this innovative field, providing essential support to the visionary artists who inspire new understandings of how technology shapes, and is shaped by, society. 

As part of the initiative, Noam Segal joined Guggenheim New York in 2023 as LG Electronics Associate Curator. Focusing on research, Segal plays an active role in developing the museum’s engagement with technology-based art, producing scholarship and public-facing content that will strengthen the goals of the multifaceted initiative across the museum’s departments. 

The multi-year initiative establishes the LG Guggenheim Award, which recognizes one artist annually for their groundbreaking achievements in technology-based art. Administered by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the award is juried by an international panel of distinguished museum directors, curators, scholars, and other arts professionals, with the selected artist receiving an unrestricted honorarium of $100,000. 

In February 2025, Guggenheim New York and LG proudly announced Ayoung Kim as the 2025 LG Guggenheim Award recipient. For more information, visit guggenheim.org/initiatives/lg-guggenheim-art-and-technology-initiative/lg-and-the-ycc-party.  

Two additional artists will be recognized with the LG Guggenheim Award through 2027. 

About LG
Founded in 1947, LG is a technology innovator and global leader in consumer electronics, automotive components, ESS, and organic light-emitting displays (OLEDs). LG Corporation (LG Corp.) is the holding company for industry-leading LG subsidiaries, such as LG Electronics, LG Display, LG Energy Solution, and LG Chem, among others. The LG group of companies employs over 270,000 people across more than 60 countries, generating $140 billion in annual revenue. For more information about the LG group of companies, please visit lgcorp.com. 

About the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation 

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation was established in 1937 and is dedicated to promoting the understanding and appreciation of modern and contemporary art through exhibitions, education programs, research initiatives, and publications. The international constellation of museums includes the Guggenheim New York, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the Guggenheim Bilbao, and the future Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. A “temple of spirit” where radical art and architecture meet, Guggenheim New York is among a group of eight Frank Lloyd Wright structures in the United States designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site. To learn more about Guggenheim New York and the Guggenheim’s activities around the world, visit guggenheim.org.