Kaufman Interview 2026

TZUSOO: The Age of Barbarism, Agarmon,

White Shirt & Black Tie

by Hyungjin Kim, 8 March 2026

Kaufman — original interview in Korean Link

TZUSOO is an artist based in Berlin and Seoul. In 2025, she was selected as the inaugural artist for the MMCA × LG OLED series, presenting Agarmon Encyclopedia: Leaked Edition.

Q. If you were to quote a line from a book, film, or song that you love, what would it be?

A.「風流は寒いものです。」

— 斎藤緑雨

Q. In the current cultural landscape, what person or movement stimulates your interest the most?

A. The reshaping of the world. I am witnessing an age of barbarism — one that dismantles the promises and values of an old era and rises on top of the rubble. What kind of attitude and moral standard should we live by in a time like this? These are the conversations I've been having with my team member Independent Garden, day after day.

To narrow it down: AI, tiresome as the topic has become. I don't use AI in my work — with the exception of the 2022-24 Dalle’s Aimy series — but I connect various AIs to everything outside of it. Cloud management, scheduling, health tracking, legal advice, taxes, the endless document processing that moves between Korean, English, and German, and a conversation partner that absorbs every delusion and dream I throw at it. Even when I'm working on art, I ask AI about the software itself. The years I spent posting on Blender community forums, agonizing over unsolved bugs, waiting for other users to reply — that method is starting to feel almost nostalgic.

Along the way, I encounter incidents, big and small. In February 2025, I began working on Eight Spirits of Flesh with an interview where I declared I would "throw a counter-punch at the AI era." It sounds grandiose, but since AI still amounts to imitating what humans have already made, my creative grammar — making images that have never existed in the world — hadn't really changed.

In the middle of the project, I learned about Google Cloud's AI training policy. They say they won't use your cloud data for AI training if you don't consent — but that's a rule made by humans, not an impossibility. Switching clouds mid-project, with terabytes of data on the line, was far too risky. So I just sat with a lot of thoughts.

One second of video requires 24 images. The 37,440 images used across two 13-minute films are rendered at 7680 × 4320 px and synced to the cloud in real time. The 8K-edited footage syncs too. So do all the Blender files — the blueprints holding the bones, flesh, and muscles of every image. Even the unused frames, all of it syncs.

Which means, theoretically, AI could be learning from these images before I've even released the work.

Q. What is the most satisfying thing you've bought recently?

A. A difficult question, since I buy almost nothing. I'd like to give a more romantic answer, but... the RTX 5080 graphics card is the only thing that comes to mind.

I was the last on the team to install a 5080, and once it was in, I was furious at myself for taking so long. Given the nature of my work — building everything from scratch — the machine's performance is directly tied to my working hours. On top of that, the Cycles renderer I use is the most sensitive and the slowest, which means in the final stretch I can't immediately see how the output will look. I have to work entirely on instinct. The grinding misery of what I call the Guessing Game was eased, just a little, by the upgrade.

The only reason I hesitated was the price. But with GPU, RAM, and SSD prices surging two to four times after the explosion in AI-related demand in the second half of 2025, it turned out to be a nerve-wracking close call. I worry about what's ahead for everyday users like us.

P.S. As a side effect, I've started gaming again for the first time in nine years. If any readers play ARC Raiders, add me: PrincessComputer#1954

Q. You work primarily in digital mediums, yet you talk constantly about the body. I think that's why the Agarmon videos at the Seoul Box felt so visceral — almost sticky. To me, the digital Agarmon in the video seemed to yearn for a body, while the physical Agarmon made of agar-agar seemed to want to evolve into something digital. If the grown digital Agarmon proposed that you swap bodies, what would TZUSOO say?

A. The body and the digital world I depict are simply the world as we exist in it. People talk about breaking boundaries between the two, crossing back and forth — but I've never really seen a dramatic boundary to begin with. Can you imagine a single day without your phone? I dislike calling the world outside the digital the "real" world. The digital world is also real. For some people, it is more real than the physical. That's why I call our generation the generation of transition, and why I regard images from the digital world with such reverence.

Humans use the body as the boundary between self and other. We carry the friction, the anxiety, the curiosity and wonder that come from the relationship between self and world. But the digital world is strange. In it, I am (almost) there, and the world is there too. There's something both fascinating and quietly heartbreaking about spending one's mind plugged into the digital world all day, while still living inside a body.

The grown digital Agarmon would never propose a body swap. That premise is only possible if you believe the body and the soul — or the mind — can be perfectly separated. If it did propose one anyway, I'd probably say: do you actually want to die?

(Reading this question, I tried to imagine what kind of relationship you have with the digital world. Someone who goes for a run when they've been on the computer too long, and then finds themselves back in bed scrolling on their phone almost immediately — something like that?)

Q. When I think of TZUSOO the artist, I think of fluorescent digital colors, but also the white shirt and black tie you're always wearing. You seem to use this outfit as both a uniform and a kind of armor. What does clothing mean to you?

A. I think several reasons are tangled together. Let me try to sort through them for the first time.

I find shopping unbearable.
I don't want to choose what to wear in the morning. My life is already a battle of choices — from blank screen to finished work. I don't want to wedge another decision in there. But I still want to be proper.
I speak through my work. I don't want my clothes doing the talking instead.
When I tuned into a small voice somewhere inside me, it turns out I've had a long-standing fetish for men who dress this way. (slightly secret.)

This translation was produced in collaboration with Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Anthropic) on May 8, 2026, through iterative dialogue on tone, word choice, and cultural nuance. All final decisions were reviewed, directed, and approved by TZUSOO.

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