When we ask what a work of art contains, we are essentially describing art as a kind of vessel. Naturally, the contents of the vessel are then regarded as the artist's inner world or a message directed at the audience, and there follows an assumption that the artist must always dutifully fill that vessel. For audiences who prefer a vessel filled with rich content, a bad work of art is thus considered an empty one—a hollow vessel—or, simultaneously, one that merely “looks like something,” a deceptive vessel.

However, the fullness an audience experiences in front of a work is not granted easily. It can only be attained through the act of thoroughly wandering and circling the interior surface of that vessel. Expressions such as “I read through the text carefully” or “I walked around that exhibition” metaphorically operate as deep metaphors for such acts of exploration. Rather than staring at the contents of the vessel statically and all at once, one examines and traverses it over time—turning the experience into a journey on foot. In this sense, an insincere viewer of art is one who may move around, but does not firmly place their feet on the path. In other words, they are someone who drifts aimlessly, or pretends to know without ever having explored—the deceptive walker of paths.

In truth, much of everyday language is metaphorical, and as Lakoff and Johnson argued in the 1980s, these metaphors are guided by a few fundamental source domains. They proposed that human behavior is shaped by powerful deep metaphors like “vessels” and “paths.” In this way, the vessel (the artwork) and the act of walking (the viewer) strive toward fulfillment through mutual effort. These deep metaphors appear across virtually all languages. At the same time, we find that they also function as recurring grammatical elements within the worldview of certain artists.

One of the most prominent features of An Gayoung’s practice is her proactive adoption of game engines as a new kind of brush and canvas to construct her virtual and interactive worlds through networks and code. Commentary that has followed her work includes statements like: “Perception and internet network environments are critical themes in contemporary art” (Jinsil Lee, 2019), “[Her work moves between] cyber-determinism and cyber-contingency in algorithm-constrained cyberspaces” (Eunsun Yoo, 2014), “Falling into the labyrinth of ‘the network,’ and retrieving something within it” (Yoonhee Jung, 2016), and “A game-like space filled with non-human objects” (Junhyoung Ahn, 2021). What these interpretations share is the observation that her work constructs virtual spaces through game-like structures and emphasizes exploration within them.

Her 2016 work The Hermes’s Box marked a definitive turn in this direction. The piece portrays the ironic narrative of Hermes, tasked with delivering a parcel for Zeus, who ends up lost—and in the act of getting lost, must begin a new process of finding a way. Unlike conventional game mechanics that reward players only when they follow preset quests, this work engages a paradox in which one must get lost in order to find a path. The audience is invited to wander directly, using a joystick. From the artist’s side, An Gayoung declares: “We were Hermes.” In contrast, Worlding (2018) was a work that dreamed of a small open world designed to accommodate more creative disorientation. This open-ended spatial design has evolved in tandem with the growing computational capacity of improved game engines. At this point, we must admit that we do not yet fully know what the artist intends to express—because sometimes, it is technology that becomes the trigger releasing the artist’s desire.

The KIN trilogy—KIN in the shelter: Beta (2019), KIN in the shelter: Online (2021), and KIN in the shelter (2021)—incorporates various technical elements such as simulation games and multiplayer avatar chatting systems. At a moment when daily life was shut down due to COVID-19 and solitary individuals began diving into cyberspace, An Gayoung introduced a turning point via metaverse platforms like VRChat: a transition from getting lost alone to getting lost together with others. What do these players, who get lost creatively as a group, actually look like?

In KIN in the shelter: Online (2021), they are in fact those who have been excluded or expelled from existing virtual worlds. Ji-hye was designed with voluptuous curves to appeal to male gamers, but once her commercial value was lost, she was discarded like data waste. Min-ji tries to enter the virtual world from the real one, yet fails to even press the control buttons properly—she is immobile. Hye-ji is a digital laborer whose carefully crafted avatar is easily stolen by others. These figures are lost or even exiled within online spaces that remain tightly bound to the realities of the offline world.

But they are not merely taking refuge in the online shelter. They are conspiring, planning a counterattack. Ji-hye eventually undergoes plastic surgery in cyberspace, arming herself with enormous wings and missiles. This image recalls Dr. Frankenstein, who sewed together a new being from scattered body parts. But unlike Frankenstein—who abandons his creation—An Gayoung helps this new being claim her twisted language not as an error, but as her own voice. The 21C Cyber Body Liberation Manifesto (2020), which the artist has long advocated, is not about escaping into cyberspace, but rather about escaping from the current conditions of cyberspace itself.

KIN in the shelter (2021) features three characters: Mei, a cloned dog sent from a drug detection unit to an animal testing lab; Joon, an outdated cleaning robot who lost his job to a newer AI vacuum; and July, a migrant laborer exposed to toxic materials at a power plant whose skin has turned green like an alien. These three characters resonate in parallel with Ji-hye, Min-ji, and Hye-ji from KIN in the shelter: Online. The key difference is that while Ji-hye, Min-ji, and Hye-ji represent cyborgian assemblages of humans and virtual technologies, Mei, Joon, and July are non-human or nearly non-human beings.

An Gayoung, KIN in the shelter, 2021 ©An Gayoung

What’s particularly interesting is that the owner of this shelter is a giant jellyfish with tentacles. In mythology, jellyfish—like creatures in the Cthulhu mythos—provoke fear in humans through their indefinable forms and aggressive tentacles. Yet in this work, the jellyfish is a godlike being who uses its tentacles to improve relationships among non-human species and fulfills all their needs. In this sense, it appears as a manifestation of the kind of accelerated network system the artist envisions—one that connects objects, animals, and aliens in communication.

At one point, the cyber-network movement envisioned the world as a web, dreaming of a decentralized, endlessly connected, and democratic space. But today’s networks have become, contrary to that ideal, not hybrid but ultra-homogenous worlds—spaces teeming not with harmony but with hatred. China’s internet, walled off behind massive firewalls that block Facebook and Google; Russia’s internet, used to track politically marked citizens; and Western IT companies that leave hate speech by far-right figures unchecked in order to profit from traffic—these have turned the spider meant to save the world into a venomous pest and monopolized the web into a network of capital.


An Gayoung, KIN in the shelter, 2021 ©An Gayoung

An Gayoung argues that rather than becoming spiders, we must become jellyfish. Jellyfish possess venomous defenses to protect themselves, fluid forms that escape capture, and bundles of tentacles capable of connecting not only humans but also non-human things in the world.

The artist’s efforts to construct a “vessel” called the world and to lose, then find, “paths” beyond the ones imposed by existing systems move toward a larger goal: to build a new base of protection and alliance. I do not see this as a development in her thinking, but rather as something always latent—briefly repressed and now reemerging. Traditional art meticulously shapes the vessel and invites audiences inside, where the process of interpretation unfolds like a tour. By contrast, An Gayoung, using the technological mediums of game engines and networks, doesn’t guide audiences toward a singular path but encourages them to lose their way. At the same time, she prepares shelters where the lost can regroup and resist. Looking at the flow of her works, it feels almost like a meticulously planned preparation for war.

Could we, then, one day witness the artist setting up small-scale networks and transforming into a jellyfish—fortifying strongholds and leading them? In this case, can art no longer be the text inside the vessel but rather a text that acts beyond the vessel? Can that overflow, that excess, be defined as art? I offer these questions to the artist while also holding them as another latent potential for the future.

The English expression “On My Way” is a beautiful one—not because it implies a personal path (“my way”), but because it evokes the ontological joy of fully inhabiting a path with self-assurance (“on”). I believe the core of An Gayoung’s work lies not simply in being online, that is, mediated through cyber networks, but in the desire to pursue the joy of being on line—to exist powerfully and autonomously on one’s own path.

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