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November 18, 2025
The theme for the special issue of MMCA Studies, conceived in collaboration with Stedelijk Studies, was born out of a moment of personal reflection on my own working conditions—on the constant societal demands to optimize my performance, whether intellectually, physically, or mentally. I found myself turning to technologies almost as an inevitable tool to meet these ever-growing pressures of hyperproductivity and hyperefficiency. Surrounded by devices that monitor and digitize every minute of (in)visible activity that I perform, my divided attention moves from one task to another, while I make mental notes on never-ending to-do lists that range from running errands and writing grant proposals to drafting essays and searching venues for upcoming exhibitions. This very publication, titled “Generating Production,” is also a result of intense collective commitment conducted in what felt like compressed space-time. Such work would not have been possible without the support and collaboration of colleagues across Seoul and Amsterdam—particularly the contributors, the editorial teams at the MMCA and the Stedelijk Museum, and the translator and designer.
Yet questions remain: Perpetual efficiency and optimization for whom and at what cost? What are the underlying desires that drive our relentless push to produce—objects, labors, discourses, among others—that, in turn, become instantly commodified? How are the latest so-called generative technologies perpetuating that mechanism of exploitation and the structures of desire? At a time when AIs seem to have not only permeated all corners of our society but also become naturalized as a part of our life, this might be an opportune moment to temporarily defamiliarize and rethink the key terms and assumptions surrounding technologies that are deeply intertwined with the “spirit of capital.”[1]
Every day, we are bombarded with the announcement of new strategy or industry policies on AIs, overflowing “how-to” guides about making the best use of them, and news reports on the increasingly militarized competition over resources that are vital for sustaining the technology. Often, these discussions are predicated on the importance of investment so as not to not fall behind other individuals, corporates, or nations, while conveniently ignoring ethical issues and environmental consequences. In this process, AI continues to be presented simultaneously as a threat and a solution to human society. Moving away from these universalizing tendencies, this issue foregrounds the geopolitical and historical contexts of Asia—particularly East and Southeast Asia—as a vital framework for unpacking the discussion on “generating production.” By inviting contributions from practitioners rooted in these regions, we emphasize that technology is never neutral; it is deeply entwined with the specific historical trajectories and sociopolitical conditions of the places where it unfolds. Asia is thus considered not as a fixed geography but as a dynamic condition—a site where histories of empires, modernization, and technological acceleration converge.
For instance, several contributions situate the region within global genealogies of technology, examining colonial infrastructures of governance and Cold War circuits of industrial and cultural exchange. Others turn to museums and curatorial practices across Korea and Southeast Asia to show how technocratic legacies of planning and productivity are inherited, contested, and reimagined within institutional frameworks. Moving beyond critique, the journal also features essays that engage with Asia as a site of ethical and imaginative production, where artists and collectives reclaim making as a mode of relation and reflection. Together, they suggest that to think about modes of production, productivity, and mechanisms of exchange in the age of generative technology is to engage with the layered histories and speculative futures that Asia embodies—a terrain where innovation and memory remain inseparably intertwined.
The term “generating” evokes a positive, almost organic growth—suggesting a process of continual becoming or birthing. Yet this generative act of machines that “give birth” to images, text, or sound is underwritten by the industrial infrastructures and extractive logics of production: data labor, computation, energy, and platform economies. The rhetoric of generation thus obscures the underlying systems of production and renders invisible its deep entanglement with them. To interrogate such entanglements, twelve artists, curators, and thinkers who have contributed to the volume primarily employ artistic inquiry as a method of critique. By reading the contemporary art field as both a mirror and a model for broader social processes, the issue examines how artistic research can reveal what remains invisible within dominant technological and institutional frameworks. In this sense, art becomes a site of inquiry that connects the aesthetic with the systemic, opening new ways to question how value, labor, and imagination are produced, circulated, and transformed today.
The journal opens with three essays that trace how the notion of production emerges from and perpetuates colonial systems of extraction and control. Through close readings of specific works or reflections on their own research-based practices, the authors show that technology, labor, and representation are never autonomous, but are instead interdependent forces through which power materializes. Building on his inquisitive work Figures of History and the Grounds of Intelligence (2024), Singapore-based artist Ho Rui An examines how Cold War–era counterinsurgency experiments in Malaya and Kenya pioneered the use of feedback systems to manage populations and shape receptivity—mechanisms that would later underpin the logics of cybernetics, the internet, and today’s cloud platforms. In these “stately networks,” he argues, power operates through circulation rather than territory, transforming information itself into a political medium of control. Curator and researcher Yi Moon-seok turns to Manchukuo’s propaganda media under Japanese imperialism and Ichihara Satoko’s performance KITTY (2025) to demonstrate how images and languages have long produced “the region” as a consumable fantasy of productivity and desire. Through his analysis of linguistic hybridity and miscommunication, he suggests that any act of knowing or representing a region must embrace fragmentation and incompleteness. Interlacing personal reflection on the research that informed the conceptualization of his latest film Fire in Water (2025), artist Nagata Kosuke articulates how Japan’s modernization was built on both domestic and colonial extraction—linking agricultural technologies, fertilizer industries, and chemical production in Korea and beyond to the later global circuits of agribusiness and environmental disaster. For him, modernity’s defining violence lies in its ability to erase loss, yet he insists on the possibility of regrafting what has been broken through memory and self-critique.
The following three essays direct their focus on generative technologies to offer a critical rethinking of AIs—beyond their anthropocentric premises. In response to contemporary issues, each author probes questions of agency and human relations under algorithmic conditions, as well as the ethical questions that arise from them. A researcher-artist collective composed of Sooyon Song and Binna Choi, Unmake Lab (est. 2016) parallels colonial taxidermy with machine learning to expose how both extract, classify, and reanimate life through systems of control, proposing a “queer computation” attentive to what remains unseen or unlearned. Koh Achim and Cheon Hyundeuk, who both engage with the ethics and philosophy of science, especially AI, engage in conversation across generations. Delving into the question of AI’s independent agency and reframing transparency as a contextual practice of trustworthiness rather than total exposure, their dialogue positions AI ethics as a necessary form of philosophical vigilance in an age of technocratic acceleration. Artist and founder of WOMAN OPEN TECH LAB Jeon Youjin turns to the affective and historical dimensions of technological life, reflecting on how the speed and immediacy of AI hollow out care, misunderstanding, and relation—the very qualities that make us human—linking this erosion to Korea’s modern history of loss and its technological dependence.
Read together, the essays by art historian Park Sohyun, curator and art historian Kathleen Ditzig, innovator and educator Ryan Ho, and curator Lee Sooyon, respectively, chart a critical genealogy of the museum as a technological, cognitive, and ethical system. Resisting the reduction of thought and culture to systems of optimization, these essays seek to redefine the museum as a dynamic site where technology, knowledge, and imagination remain irreducibly human. Unpacking National Gallery Singapore’s unprecedented commission of an AI double of the artist Amanda Heng, Kathleen Ditzig and Ryan Ho reimagines the museum as both archive and laboratory, where histories of colonial extraction intersect with the emerging ethics of AI, proposing that museums can redirect technology toward more plural and situated futures. Park Sohyun, on the other hand, excavates the historical nexus of art, industry, and state planning in Korea’s participation in the world’s fairs of the 1960s and 1970s, revealing how developmentalist visions of efficiency and modernization suppressed alternative, more speculative futures for art and the museum. MMCA curator Lee Sooyon, in turn, moves way from specific case studies and locates human intelligence in the overlapping histories of philosophy, literature, and cybernetics, arguing for the enduring depth of perception and intuition as counterpoints to mechanized cognition.
The final three essays move inward, tracing how artistic and curatorial work becomes a way of living, thinking, and caring. In her conversation with me, Seoul-based producer Shin Jinyoung redefines creative production as an ethical and temporal practice sustained through rehearsal and embodied labor—proposing collectivity as a counterforce to the acceleration of institutional time. Meanwhile, upon invitation of curator and producer Eugene Hannah Park, the collective AFSAR, of which she is a member, turns writing into a shared temporal and emotional field, where delay, love, and loss become feminist strategies of survival and solidarity. In Mi You’s A Couplet, writing becomes a philosophical and political gesture of self-critique: drawing on East Asian thinkers such as Lu Xun, Takeuchi Yoshimi, and Wang Hui, she examines how the capacity for critique itself has been weakened by moral certainty and binary thinking in today’s polarized political landscape. She argues that the resurgence of religious forms continues to structure global cultural politics, while algorithmic systems accelerate the erasure of mediating structures between the state and the individual. Against this backdrop, Mi You calls for a renewed ethics of humility and doubt, one that refuses the comfort of righteousness.
As the editorial fellow, I also found myself rethinking how a research publication is conceived, written, and circulated. Rather than viewing the editor as a solitary authority, I approached the role as a collective practice of thinking and making. To that end, four of the twelve contributors—Eugene Hannah Park, Shin Jinyoung, Yi Moon-seok, and Jeon Youjin —joined the early stages of the project as members of a working group. Meeting monthly between February and May 2025, we shared our practices, articulated questions, and experimented with different editorial strategies, treating conversation as both method and medium. This issue is thus deeply indebted to the times, dialogues, and imaginations we nurtured as a group—an experiment in collaborative knowledge making that mirrors the very questions of production and generation at the heart of this publication.
Sooyoung Leam is an art historian and curator based in Seoul. She has been actively engaged in research and curatorial projects focusing on modern and contemporary art in East Asia, with a particular interest in transnational exhibition practices and the formation of Asian subjectivities. She currently teaches at Seoul National University and Kyung Hee University. Her writings have appeared in journals such as Sculpture Journal, and the Journal of History of Modern Art. Forthcoming publications include “The Citizens Art School: Practicing Collectivity through Printmaking in South Korea, 1980s–90s” in Toward a New Aesthetics: Institutional Criticism in Art Education from 1900 to Today (Brill, 2025), and “East Asia through the Lens of Suwon: Communication Art Group (1990–96) and the Festivalization of Performance” in Art in Translation. Her recent curatorial projects include the Seoul Art Prize-shortlisted exhibition Walking Korea: Cut Pieces (2024–25), the 14th Gwangju Biennale (2023), and To A Faraway Friend: Beyond Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities (Busan, 2022). She earned her BA in History of Art from the University of Cambridge, followed by an MA and PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Her doctoral research focused on the sculptural experiments of Lee Seung-taek, exploring the intersections of avant-garde art and postwar Korean history.
[1] Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda, “On Modes of Exchange: Interview with Kojin Karatani,” Crisis & Critique 8, no. 2 (2021): 361–70.
MMCA Studies x Stedelijk Studies Fellowship
Fellow Sooyoung Leam
