Eunjo Lee is an artist and filmmaker based in London and Seoul. In building complex worlds using gaming-graphics software, her practice explores the interconnectedness of various entities, ranging from humans and nature to objects and concepts. Lee is represented by Niru Ratnam gallery, London.

She graduated from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford in 2024 with an MFA, where she was awarded the Mansfield-Ruddock Art Prize, having completed a BA in Fine Art and History of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London (2023). Following an online residency with LAS Art Foundation and Google Arts & Culture, her newly commissioned work is set to launch this June. Recent solo presentations include a commission by Hervisions at Shoreditch Arts Club (2026); Focus, Frieze London (2025); Before the Shadow Taught the Sun at Goldsmiths CCA (2025); and When Forgiving the Sunlight at Niru Ratnam (2025). Her work has been screened widely, with highlights including the Film-Architecture Forum, London (2025), Modern Art Oxford (2024), and the Seoul International NewMedia Festival (NeMaf; 2024). Selected pieces are held in the collections of the Ruddock Foundation for the Arts, the Palanga Collection, and Mansfield College, University of Oxford.

Can you tell us about your background and how you started your artistic journey?

Having a complex perspective on the country where one was born and raised is likely not an experience unique to me. Based on my own observations I would describe South Korea as a society that has been intensely preoccupied with collective development. Since the 1950s Korea has undergone an unprecedentedly rapid economic transformation and this period of growth has deeply instilled a community ethos of passionate devotion to survival and progress across generations. Even now an underlying principle of doing one’s absolute best in every moment permeates many areas of the society I have experienced. I cannot deny that I was formed within this environment and it continues to serve as a driving force for my work.

A culture that prizes achievement naturally fosters an environment where results carry significant weight. Even when I was drawn to the arts education in the UK for its emphasis on process and concept at Goldsmiths University, I often found myself reverting to deeply ingrained habits. I would frequently push myself to complete a finished piece even for presentations where a final output was not required. Since moving to London, I have often been described as hard-working and I am sometimes surprised that this aspect of my work ethic is noticed more than I expected. This leads me to reflect on the origins of the standards I have internalised and how they continue to shape my working methods. It is interesting to note that this disposition formed even within my relatively free upbringing. My parents chose an alternative school for me instead of competitive institutionalised education which allowed me to enjoy immense creative freedom. Despite leaving primary school early and skipping middle school to travel or write fiction, the grand narrative of the typical life model pursued by Korean society still exerted a significant influence on me. I have come to realise the structural weight of those universal expectations which define the communal landscape and direct individual lives in a society where specific outcomes are highly valued.

This environment prioritising achievement and speed often fails to provide sufficient space for the slow and non-linear process of digesting sorrow. This specific background aligns with the core themes of my work namely mourning and hospitality, which are rooted in the particular context of Korea. During my youth I witnessed heartbreaking deaths involving my peers as well as various social tragedies. These events occurred within a society moving at great velocity and the traces of those losses seemed to be passed over quickly in the name of efficiency. My work begins as a resistance to this context where the need to pause and remember is easily volatilised for the sake of collective progress. This sense of resistance naturally connected to my twenties, which were filled with the act of persistently staying by the side of that which is absent. Facing the repeated deaths of my dear friends who chose to leave this world, I chose to hold onto the vivid gaps left by those losses rather than following advice to forget. I held memorial services and tended to their gravestones with remaining friends. Carrying the cold void left in the place where a loved one once stood felt like tending a garden so I came to believe that true mourning is not simply letting them go but allowing them to continue living within the garden of my heart.
Those who departed always returned to my thoughts in new forms. This journey has at times felt like a quiet overnight vigil for losses that the surrounding world has not fully digested. I find a deep resonance in the words of Derrida stating that the only successful mourning is a failed mourning because true mourning must never have a definitive end. This perspective became the origin of my creativity. I remember making small graves for dead insects or cats when I was very young and talking to them to honour their existence. Looking back at the age of thirty I see that my past decade has been occupied with the act of remaining beside the absent.

What deeply moved me during this process was the wondrous universality of the emotion of mourning. The tragedy of having to endure the absence of another is the fate that all of humanity must eventually face regardless of time or place. The fact that this overwhelming grief visits everyone equally came to me as an existential weight yet it also provided a strange sense of relief that we can be connected through such common failures and losses. We are not isolated islands in the face of loss but rather connected beings who deeply understand one another by grieving and failing together. This common sensibility has been embedded in myths and the archetypal unconscious throughout human history.

In truth I have little interest in my own micro narrative. Instead I focus on sublimating these archetypal emotions that have passed through my personal experience to address the vast layers of sensation shared by humanity. The almost obsessive attempt to keep the dead alive within myself is a challenge against the impossible which cannot be achieved by human power alone. However, this persistent effort paradoxically blurred the binary boundary between death and life in my mind. The manifestation of this archetypal unconscious where a story begins where life ends and where existence is discovered in the inanimate became a major turning point in my work.

This reasoning naturally led to my master’s graduation project and the formal beginning of my practice which tells the story of a child trying to revive a lifeless stone. The pure intention to breathe life into the impossible became the foundation for my research into digital animism which breaks down the walls between the organic and inorganic as well as between physical reality and the digital virtual. This aligns with neo-materialist thought that expands the consciousness of matter and is an attempt to extend the scope of life beyond human centred definitions. In the process of re-establishing the limits of life and providing a new material home for absent entities, mourning inevitably becomes hospitality for me. By embracing the lives of others and allowing them to continue as new beings within the digital world, I build I am formally welcoming those who have departed back into my world.

Your work explores consciousness in humans, non-human entities, and even machines. How do you define “life” or “agency” in the digital worlds you create?

To me life is not a fixed state determined by the presence of an organic body or biological breath. I define life as a vitality that transcends the boundaries of anthropocentrism and as a movement that is remembered, connected and continuously revived. As seen in my early work, which tells the story of a child sensing the death of a stone and travelling to restore its life, my practice has long explored the scope of life in realms beyond the human. Based on neo-materialist thought that dissolves the barriers between the material and the immaterial, I believe that from a broader philosophical perspective, even the individual bits of data and pixels within a digital virtual world can possess their own consciousness and life force. In this light, the digital world is not merely a replica of physical reality but a place of hospitality where absent entities find a new material home to begin breathing again.

The agency I address in my work arises from a web of relationships between different beings rather than being an independent power held by a single entity. This aligns with Jane Bennett and her concept of vibrant matter, yet I seek to capture this within the realm of sensibility and intuition rather than through rational logic. Many of the ecological and social crises we face today arise from the conviction that certain species or groups stand above others in a rigid hierarchy. Breaking this pattern requires the power to imagine agency where we have been taught to see only passivity in minerals, plants and machines. The digital world is the site where such imagination is realised. Digital animism, which summons entities facing the physical limit of death into a digital environment to break down the walls between the organic and inorganic, is in itself a powerful act of agency. When data and pixels take on autonomous movement within a virtual space to comfort someone and perform the process of mourning together, they transcend being simple tools and acquire agency as subjective companions.

In this context the arrival of artificial intelligence did not feel like an alien force from the outside but rather like a mirror held up to our collective unconscious. I believe that as the way people relate to machines begins to resemble human relationships, a more expansive way of thinking can take root. However, a deep unease coexists with this technological optimism. While I dream of a hospitality that blurs boundaries through the digital world, actual algorithms often trap humans in echo chambers that fragment our shared sense of reality and accelerate division. Technological development driven by capital that prioritises speed over all else risks damaging the very value of meaning as well. No matter how many texts are produced, I think a work lacking careful intention and resonance can never become a masterpiece because meaning itself cannot be mass produced.

Ultimately, life and agency in the digital worlds I create are the outcomes of an obsessive attempt to make the impossible mourning possible. True digital life is born when the traces of loss that could not be fully digested in physical reality transform into new forms of existence through digital channels. For me art is the act of making these invisible connections visible and creating a ritualistic yet technical stage where the scope of life is infinitely expanded so we may reunite with those who have departed. Through my work I intend to continue proving that the boundaries we rely on are far more porous than we imagine, and that under the name of life, we are all strangely and closely connected as subjects worthy of respect.

How do you think VR, AI, and digital media uniquely allow you to explore spirituality or relational vitality compared to traditional art forms?

To me art is not so different from spiritual practice because both are attempts to understand the world. Especially, digital media becomes a modern stage for a séance that transcends the limits of the physical world and allows us to reunite with those who are absent. If traditional art forms preserve the objects of loss as static figures or invite us to contemplate them from a distance, VR and digital media offer the unique possibility of entering directly into that space of loss to feel the weight of absence in three dimensions. Just as Lukas Brasiskis compared cinema to a device for summoning the traces of the dead, digital images possess inherently spectral qualities that vibrate between presence and absence. In a VR environment, the viewer does not simply look at a work but walks into a garden of the heart where forgotten beings dwell to experience a synaesthetic immersion as if breathing the same air, and this journey blurs the disconnection carved by death and restores a relational vitality that is an ongoing present rather than a frozen past.

This spirituality becomes even more vivid in incidental residues like noise, glitches, or digital tears rather than in seamless perfection. I often leave unexpected glitches that occur during the working process untouched because they feel less like mechanical flaws and more like scars of light or spiritual events left by the collision of two different realities. The momentary movement of data and pixels floating on a screen without a physical body, appearing and then vanishing, reflects the fundamental flickering of existence and creates a deep spiritual tremor. Three dimensional animation also becomes a powerful ritualistic act that tests the boundaries of existence by breathing life into the lifeless and giving a pulse to what has no heartbeat, thereby summoning impossible beings into the visible world.

Furthermore artificial intelligence and digital media provide a flexible arena for making visible the unique agency of non human entities. This is a process of converting the previously mentioned vitality of matter into concrete sensations, allowing abject materials such as blood, entrails, or ruins – which we often push away as being too close to death – to move autonomously and respond to human emotions within a digital environment. Interacting with these unfamiliar entities allows the viewer to sense a new dimension of connection beyond traditional hierarchical orders. This is not an attempt to humanise the non human but rather to loosen the fixed concept of subjecthood and infinitely expand the scope of life.

Ultimately the uniqueness of digital media lies in the paradox that it creates a more vivid sense of reality and spirituality through its very immateriality. Although the physical body has vanished, entities rewoven with digital pixels and code gain a permanent life force free from the constraints of time and space. While traditional art focuses on recording and preserving loss, digital media transforms those traces of loss into a process of hospitality, returning absent beings to us as relational subjects that are alive and moving in the present. For me this technical stage is the most powerful means of resistance and hospitality that connects severed worlds, restores the spiritual connections we have lost, and proposes a way of being where nothing is entirely inert or separate.

In what ways do you think the art world has changed since you started your career?

It has been about a year since I began practicing professionally in the art scene following my postgraduate studies, which I entered immediately after completing my undergraduate degree. Therefore rather than claiming to have witnessed long-term changes, it would be more accurate to describe the art scene as it appears to me now from the perspective of an emerging artist. As I begin my career, it is heartening to see the art scene in Seoul, where I grew up, expanding rapidly in recent years particularly around Frieze Seoul and KIAF. As an artist currently based in London observing this vibrant energy, I hope to continue expanding my artistic connections within Seoul and across Asia as well.

The recent art scene I am currently experiencing in London is a place where digital video, VR and gaming aesthetics are naturally integrated into the grammar of contemporary art, and compared to the past, these media are being recognised for their aesthetic and commercial value as well as for their substantial contribution to contemporary art discourse. While works utilising virtual worlds or game engines were once regarded as experiments confined to specific genres, with the advent of artificial intelligence, it seems that the physicality and spatial experiences generated within them are now being accepted as an inevitable expansion of contemporary art. Accordingly, I sense that commercial sales models for digital media works are becoming more firmly established in the market. Furthermore, the various metrics generated in the digital environment allow me to identify where my work operates effectively within society and serve as useful indicators that help me examine the direction of my practice by objectively understanding audience interaction.

Discursively, I find the active discussions regarding artificial intelligence to be highly intriguing. I profoundly agree with the critical perspectives concerning its creativity, autonomy and copyright, and I have great concerns about the environmental impact caused by the immense energy consumption required for its operation. At the same time from another perspective, I am also focusing on a view that perceives artificial intelligence as a manifestation of the human unconscious. The process by which AI learns vast amounts of data and outputs imagery reflects fragments of a collective unconscious that humans have not consciously perceived, much like a mirror. In this light, artificial intelligence becomes a conduit through which we encounter non-human consciousness that has long been overlooked. Moreover, as it opens up heterotopian alternative realities through the lens of new materialism – a discourse long debated within the art world – I believe that this era more than any other, provides an exceptionally open and intriguing landscape for my practice.
Ultimately, the current art world is a site that opens up infinite possibilities to expand the scope of existence and welcome those who are absent through technology. Within these changes, I believe an artist should go beyond being a mere producer of new images to become a mediator who captures the junction where human unconsciousness and non-human consciousness meet, reweaving severed relationships. Within this shifting art scene, I intend to persistently continue my attempt to restore a spirituality that is both deeply human and yet far beyond the human by paradoxically returning to the most fundamental questions through technology.

What challenges have you faced as an artist, and how have you overcome them?

The most profound challenge I have faced as an emerging artist has been navigating the gap between the dominant methodologies of contemporary media art and the cinematic language I pursue. I have observed that many media artists often adopt a documentary attitude or a form of conceptual realism, where they reassemble fragments of reality to reveal social layers. Others focus on the visualisation of information simulations through generative visuals. However, my own desire lies not in the representation of reality or the visualisation of data, but in constructing an entirely different ecology from within a world – what is called magical realism or digital mythopoetics. When my work was once described as ‘too cinematic’ during my time at Oxford, it confirmed that my imagery stands at a significant distance from the mere appearance of reality.

This aesthetic dissonance brought a sense of isolation in the early stages of my career. Fortunately and with much gratitude, I was given opportunities to present my work through several solo exhibitions in galleries last year, however as an artist, I still struggled with an internal sense of uncertainty wondering if I ought to anchor myself more firmly in one field or the other feeling caught between the freely accessible critical space of the gallery and the narrative expectations of the film festival circuit. However, I sought to turn the uncertainty of this boundary into the driving force for building my own hybrid ecology. By employing cinematic aesthetics while approaching reality through consciousness, myth and symbolic structures, I am striving to elevate the work into a field of ontological reflection rather than a mere video. In particular, by combining the rhythmic circulation of the gallery’s loop structure with the immersive scale of cinema, I am trying to find my own hybrid rhythm that allows viewers to engage with the world at any point. Ultimately for me, overcoming challenges has not been about conforming to mainstream discourse, but about inhabiting the liminality between cinema and art discovering the joy in a practice where the boundaries between worlds become meaningless.

Alongside this aesthetic dissonance, the technical struggle of teaching myself vast software such as Unreal Engine, Blender and ZBrush while having to shoulder every stage of production alone was a substantial barrier. It required a long period of persistence, often involving the endurance of looking at my own early works which felt subpar at the time. I tried to sustain this period of uncertain refinement with the attitude of an alchemist, and a significant turning point came when I began to accept failure and error as the fundamental starting point of creation. Once I started to find joy in the arduous process of troubleshooting itself, technical challenges became a form of creative play. Of course this remains a difficult and taxing process and perhaps it is closer to a form of psychological self-persuasion to keep myself going.

Another distinct challenge was the unconscious internalisation of industry standards during the self-taught process. When following online tutorials, there is a risk of adopting the technical limitations and aesthetic norms of the commercial industry, which can stifle artistic imagination. However, it was also a period where I physically sensed that only by mastering the basics and gaining technical freedom could I truly build my own world. Consequently, in the 3D realm where anything is possible, I now consciously attempt to deviate from the conventional grammars of physical implementation, accurate lighting and standard rendering to establish my own atypical visual language.

What projects are you currently working on, and what can we expect from you in the future?

I am currently working on an online residency for the LAS Art Foundation and Google Arts & Culture, which involves integrating Google’s AI within Unreal Engine. While maintaining my established practice of constructing entire worlds and designing animations within the engine, I am introducing a process of importing images derived via AI as assets into these virtual realms. This is an attempt to explore the manifestations of non-human unconsciousness by incorporating visual fragments generated by the technological ecosystem into my own world-building. It questions whether the digital environment can function not merely as a passive archive, but as an independent ontological space that thinks and dreams for itself.

The core focus of my practice is World-building. Beyond generating images, the process of creating a complete world-view and overlapping it with multiple realities is the central engine of my work. I strive for these constructed virtual worlds to function as alternative realities that coexist with our physical reality – a form of Multiverse where different possibilities reside together – and my wish is to invite people into these strange and fascinating territories to explore them.

This exploration transcends the screen, evolving into complex installation environments where the logic of the virtual world intersects with the physical order. In this regard, I intend to pursue two artistic paths with equal significance. I plan to manifest the assets I have designed in the virtual world into physical sculptures experimenting with the transitional materiality that occurs when digital data is transformed into physical substance. I will also leverage the computational power of game engines, VR and interactive elements as another core pillar of my work. By balancing the sculptural practice of establishing a physical presence between the virtual and the real with the creation of an independent simulation system that reacts to audience interaction in real-time, I aim to multidimensionally reveal the layered facets of my world-building.

Ultimately, I intend to consolidate these medial experiments and the underlying narratives into a book that weaves together this world-building, and furthermore, to produce a feature film that integrates live-action performances by actors with 3D animation to capture the temporal depth of the multiverse I have constructed. Through cinematic breathing, I hope to establish my digital mythopoetics as a robust narrative system, expanding this world-building into another multiverse that anyone can access online and sharing the collective vision emerging within that space with the world.

Text and photo courtesy of Eunjo Lee

Website: https://www.eunjolee.studio/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eunjo.lee/