The Commission

Dancer in the Mirror Field (2025) is a speculative fiction film by South Korean artist Ayoung Kim — co-commissioned by M+ Hong Kong and Powerhouse Sydney, and presented on the M+ Facade from 3 October to 28 December 2025. This project marks the first collaboration between the two institutions. The work will be presented at Powerhouse Parramatta as part of the launch of the new museum. The digital infrastructure connecting those two presentations — the 3D scanned collection objects that appear inside the film itself — was the engineering task.

The Screen

The M+ Facade is 65 metres tall by 110 metres wide, embedded with thousands of LEDs, and visible up to 1.5 kilometres away when viewed from Hong Kong Island. It overlooks Victoria Harbour. It is one of the largest media facades in the world. Every night for three months, a film containing digitally rendered Powerhouse collection objects played at full scale to a live city audience — and to millions more who will see it carried forward into the Parramatta opening.

The Engineering Work

Powerhouse suggested a list of objects, which were reselected down to approximately 20–30 items. These were then scanned with a 3D scanner and incorporated — alongside rave festival posters and iconic artworks — into the film's visual landscape. The deliverable was not a file. It was a high-fidelity digital twin of physical collection objects, produced at a standard suitable for a major international moving image work, accurate enough to hold up on a 65-metre screen.

Curatorial and cultural accuracy had to be maintained across international teams and artist studios. The objects needed to read correctly within the film's context — as fragments of institutional identity inside a speculative fiction about optimisation, labour, and technology. That required close coordination across Powerhouse collections staff, the artist's studio in Seoul, and the curatorial team at M+.

The Artist

Ayoung Kim's ongoing series Delivery Dancers investigates technoprecarity and the gig economy's relentless optimisation. Having received the 2024 ACC Future Prize and 2025 LG Guggenheim Award, Kim recently made her solo debut in Europe at Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof and will open a major solo presentation at New York's MoMA PS1. The kinematic visuals in Dancer in the Mirror Field were created using CGI, motion capture, 3D game engines, and AI-generated imagery. The Powerhouse collection objects sit inside that production pipeline.

What Persists

This is the first time Powerhouse collection objects have been represented digitally at this scale on an international stage. The objects are now part of a work that has screened in Hong Kong, will anchor the opening of Powerhouse Parramatta, and will be seen by millions globally. The scans remain in the archive — ready for what comes next.