Hyundai Turns New York Museum Elevators Into an AI Art Installation
Ho Tzu Nyen's AI-driven video plays every time a visitor presses a floor button, and a companion work opens in Hyundai's factory city of Ulsan in October.
Hyundai's newest project in New York has nothing to do with cars. Starting September 24, the glass-front elevators at the New Museum on the Bowery will play an AI-driven video work by Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen, paid for through the automaker's Hyundai Translocal Series.
The piece, P for Power: Up Down, reacts to riders. Each time someone presses a floor button, one of five Singaporean children appears full-height on the screen and offers a short line about power, sometimes a question and sometimes a riddle. The imagery around them is generated on the spot, so no two rides look the same. It stays up through January 24, 2027.
A second work, P for Power: Double Life of P, opens October 22 at the Ulsan Art Museum in Korea. It runs on 24 projectors and multichannel sound built partly from data about the city's industry. That is no random pick. Ulsan hosts the complex Hyundai calls the world's largest single car plant, in operation since 1968.
The two-city show is the second under the Translocal banner, which Hyundai launched in 2025 as a decade-long program funding joint commissions between Korean and overseas institutions. The first, Entangled and Woven, paired the Cheongju Craft Biennale with the Whitworth in Manchester last fall. The New Museum and Ulsan will stage two more commissions through 2028, according to Hyundai.
Translocal is only the newest layer of a long-running arts budget. Hyundai has funded the annual Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern since 2014, a deal Tate calls the longest initial pledge any corporate partner has made to it and one now extended to 2036. In February, the automaker also renewed its partnership with Los Angeles' LACMA through 2037.
The payoff is measured in audience rather than sales. Tate says the Hyundai Commission alone has drawn more than 19 million visitors in a decade. Hyundai has not disclosed how much it spends on any of these programs.
