Media artist Ayoung Kim has received the 38th Lee Jung-seop Art Award, the Korean prize named for the modern master Lee Jung-seop (1916–1956), as reported by K-ARTNOW. The award extends a remarkable sequence of milestones for an artist who has repeatedly become the first Korean to win major international honours. Kim won the Golden Nica, the top prize at the Prix Ars Electronica, in 2023, the first Korean to do so, for her Delivery Dancer series, which was produced with support from the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture. In 2025 she became the first Korean artist to win the LG Guggenheim Award, and in 2026 she received the CHANEL Next Prize. She has held solo exhibitions at Hamburger Bahnhof, Germany's national museum of modern art, and at MoMA PS1, the Museum of Modern Art's New York affiliate, placing her among the most internationally visible Korean artists working today. Born in 1979 and trained in motion graphics and lens-based media, Kim builds complex virtual environments that blend live action with animation and gaming technologies. She describes herself as a storyteller of synthesis, using generative AI and game engines as her key tools, and her work draws on everything from ancient cosmologies to the daily realities of algorithmic management, including the delivery riders at the centre of the Delivery Dancer series. Her practice sits at the boundary of technology and humanity, labour and myth. In July 2026 she delivered a special lecture at Cheong Wa Dae, the former presidential Blue House in Seoul, on art in the age of machine vision, reflecting on how artists can work intuitively with technologies that are reshaping human experience. The Lee Jung-seop Art Award adds a domestic honour to a career that has been recognised on the world stage, underlining her standing as one of the leading figures of K-media art.