Kim Ye was selected  as a recipient of the Franklin Furnace FUND for the 2025-26 season. This marked the 40th anniversary of the Franklin Furnace FUND, which presents, preserves, interprets, educates, and advocates on behalf of avant-garde art, and awards artists selected by peer panel review to produce major performance art works in New York City.

Ye’s project, Choreographies of Care was selected from 382 applications, and is inspired by the popular Asian practice of park dancing. Drawing from a range of movement sources—including the Military’s 20 Person Active Duty Sequence, pregnancy exercises, and breathwork inspired by Tai Chi and Qigong— these gestural vocabularies are interwoven to highlight how economic and geopolitical “growth” relies on forms of labor far beyond masculinized sectors of national security and militarized “defense”. Highlighting the physical echoes across vocabularies, this piece troubles assumptions about labor and value, asking audiences to recognize the feminized—often invisible—work of producing and reproducing the democratic subject within privatized spaces of the body and care, and revealing the inherent entanglements between birth and death, war and peace, native and foreign, and acts of public and private service. The performance will be filmed by drone and circulate as both a work for live audiences, and as a moving image piece.

Other 2025-26 recipients include Luca Evans, Miguel Alejandro, Matt Romein, Symin Adive, Luis Eduardo, edua mercedes, Nada Tshibwabwa, and Xxavier Carter.