Ahyeon Ryu (b. 1996) explores how individuals with digital literacy perceive political and economic phenomena. Specifically, the artist aims to highlight how individuals' unique characteristics, including race, gender, region, and socioeconomic class, are increasingly commodified and consumed within a culture steeped in consumerism.
 
Through her work, Ryu shapes the habitual processes of perception embedded in the system, visualizes the unique situations of individuals alienated under capitalism, and seeks to envision a subjective future beyond the cycle of the capitalist spectacle.

While Ahyeon Ryu’s practice is strongly characterized by performance, its operating principle is fundamentally rooted in the object. By employing the body as an object, the artist redefines the inherent qualities of matter through movement, establishes new relationships with the audience, and develops her work.
 
Her performances not only provide a visual experience within a physical environment akin to sculpture but also penetrate into everyday life by creating an immaterial sphere of information exchange. For instance, in ‘White Mirror’ (2019-2020) series, where she appeared wearing a flesh-toned silicone bodysuit, Ryu created an environment in which audiences could directly experience the unconscious habits of image consumption inherited from the internet.

In this work, the audience is first confronted with staged nude images set within a virtual space that has become all too familiar through today’s video platforms. The silicone nude, flaunting its soft skin, is captured in a closed-circuit stream broadcast in real time, forcing a voyeuristic gaze upon the viewers.
 
As a result, the audience unconsciously replicates male-centered viewing habits, objectifying the avatar on the monitor. However, the avatar on screen is in fact secretly observing the viewers from just behind a thin wall, dancing in real time according to their commands.
 
Unaware of this fact, the audience continues to watch voyeuristically, only to suddenly hear the performer’s clapping from beyond the wall. At that moment, they realize that the being on screen is breathing right in front of them, which brings about a profound sense of discomfort.

Through this, the audience is placed at the forefront of the state of image labor, directly entangled with objects (images), thereby becoming able to sense the larger system of consumption beyond the easily replicated structures of image production. In doing so, the work offers an opportunity to reconsider how images are circulated within the capitalist ecosystem at a time when the media industry is flourishing.

In Burlesque (2021), the artist sought to visualize the labor structures within platforms where data circulates under the logic of neoliberal capitalism. In the work, laborers are divided into two roles: those who distribute images in order to produce tangible commodities within the system, and those who labor to produce images that themselves have been transformed into commodities.
 
The former, exemplified by food delivery, foregrounds productivity in the form of waged labor, whereas the latter performs unpaid labor in the private sphere to cultivate the ideal body.

In the work, the two forms of labor circulate as video data through sculptural interfaces installed in the exhibition space, thereby extending the site of labor into the gallery, where sculptural workers and audiences interact. The workers, serving as pedestals (interfaces) for the video, remind viewers that the labor of image distribution in reality has been sealed within the spectacle of the video. Through this transition of labor, the audience is reminded that the act of viewing itself also constitutes a labor market in which images are exchanged.

Meanwhile, in The Triptych (2022), a work presented in photographic form rather than performance, the artist required the audience to shift the position of their gaze. Whereas the earlier work ‘White Mirror’ series addressed the unconscious adoption of male-centered viewing habits in the internet environment through a performance foregrounding nude imagery, The Triptych in contrast turns its attention to female spectatorship.
 
The work adopts the layout of fashion magazines and the triptych format used in religious paintings, bringing into the exhibition space objectified images of the body that have been unconsciously reproduced in everyday life. By foregrounding physical beauty and idolizing the subject, the work encourages viewers to identify themselves with the avatar within the image.
 
Through this, the audience comes to recognize their participation in the system of image consumption and reacknowledges themselves as commodities circulated as flattened entities stripped of uniqueness.

Continuing to shed light on the circulation of images under the current conditions of capitalism, Ahyeon Ryu staged her 2023 solo exhibition 《Outlet》 at Museumhead as a virtual store, visualizing the ways in which the human body is commodified and consumed.
 
Taking its title from ‘outlet,’ a term that refers to a temporary market where unsold goods are offered at discounted prices, the exhibition transformed the gallery into a store that is temporarily (in)activated. Within this setting, Ryu transcribed the human body—cast adrift in the logic of consumerism—into sculptural works and movements entangled with them.

The exhibition space was further structured into a ‘showroom’ and a ‘fitting room.’ In the ‘showroom,’ which was activated only at specific times, a performance took place once a week. When inactive, the panels amounted to nothing more than flat screens; yet, once activated, human bodies began to protrude from them. At this moment, the performers’ gestures—largely held in static poses—solidified into a state that fused the immobile sculpture with the screen.

In the ‘fitting room,’ the solidified bodies were even more prominently displayed. The human sculptures, lined up behind plastic curtains, were presented not merely as bodies themselves but as bodies adhered to fashion that must be renewed daily. The sculptures, wearing thick padded jackets, stockings emphasizing sensuality, and masks adorned with accessories, evoked the ‘body’ as a dual entity—both body and clothing—in today’s context.

While this series of works seems to point to the contemporary issue of reducing the human body’s existence to the exhibition value of commodities, the artist simultaneously proposes a paradoxical possibility for imagining alternative models of subjectivity within these bodily images. By making the body compatible with external elements and revealing the image as a skin that binds the interface between subject and world to an extreme degree, the artist guides viewers to envision new forms of the body.

Last year, at the 《24th SONGEUN Art Award Exhibition》 held at SONGEUN, Ahyeon Ryu presented a series of sculptural works that offered alternative imaginaries confronting a techno-capitalist society where artificial fantasies, epitomized by AI, violently shape personal desires and political tendencies, even intruding on speculative play.
 
To escape the seamless distribution networks of capitalism, Elevator (2024) and Escalator (2024) propose new strategies: “Scrolling,” which transforms data into malleable forms by scrolling at immense speed, and “Slipping,” which slides outside rigid screens to shatter physical windows. The sculptures, which repeat and accelerate a series of movements, function as self-powering wheels, transforming into subversive images that reject readability.
 
Invited as dynamic components of this mechanism, viewers continuously move and dismantle incomplete images, joining a collective effort to reclaim individual imagination against endless consumerism.

Meanwhile, in her recent work Research-b (2025), Ahyeon Ryu focused less on the surrounding social context and more on the inherent qualities of sculpture as a medium and the process of its making. The work visualizes the process of revisiting what was discarded along the way to achieving the sculpture’s inherent quality of ‘solidity.’
 
Seeking to create ‘sculpture as process’ rather than as a fixed object, Ryu used this work to experiment with the role of structures that traverse space and the interactivity between media. As the title suggests, the work began as an inquiry into discourses associated with the letter ‘b,’ such as Building, Blind, and Blank. Scenes combining sketches and memories of each word are slowly piled against the wall to form the completed work.

Through this series of works, Ahyeon Ryu hopes to empower those who have passively mimicked desires to break free from the confines of capitalist spectacle and actively reinterpret images, thereby revealing the dominant representational system autonomously.
 
In other words, her work illuminates the extensive influence images exert on individuals within the intersecting consumerist platforms of reality and virtuality. Ultimately, by reshaping the political potential of images circulated within capitalist frameworks, it is hoped that an alternative space can be created wherein audiences can independently engage with images.

 “I think we have reached a point where the ‘visualization’ of how we, as image producers, create images needs to be considered in a one-dimensional way. I plan to continue my practice as a way of exploring these concerns.”  (Ahyeon Ryu, excerpted from an interview with Art Insight)

Ahyeon Ryu graduated from the Department of Sculpture at Hongik University and earned her MFA from the Royal College of Art in the UK. Her solo exhibitions include 《Outlet》 (Museumhead, Seoul, 2023–2024) and 《White Mirror: Prequel Version》 (WWW Space, Seoul, 2020).
 
She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《Tactics for an Era》 (K&L Museum, Gwacheon, 2025), 《The 24th SONGEUN Art Award Exhibition》 (SONGEUN, Seoul, 2024), 《Asphodel Meadows》 (Staffordshire St, London, 2023), 《Embodied》 (Morley Gallery, London, 2023), 《To You: Move Toward Where You Are》 (ARKO Art Center, Seoul, 2022), 《The Taming of the Shrew》 (Museumhead, Seoul, 2022), and 《Are You Afraid of Severance?》 (SAGA, Seoul, 2021).
 
In 2025, Ahyeon Ryu was selected as one of the final recipients of the Chunman Art for Young Award.

References

• 유아연, Ahyeon Ryu (Artist Website)
• 비애티튜드, 피부 아래 있는 사람이 바라보는 세상
• 뮤지엄헤드, [서문] Outlet (Museumhead, [Preface] Outlet)
• 송은, [도록] 제24회 송은미술대상전 (SONGEUN, [Catalogue] the 24th SONGEUN Art Award Exhibition)
• 천만아트포영, 유아연 – Research-b (Chunman Art for Young, Ahyeon Ryu - Research-b)
• 아트인사이트, [Interview] 일상에서 마주친 아연함