Eunjo Lee at Niru Ratnam Gallery
“I don’t think of the world as fixed categories,” artist Eunjo Lee tells me, speaking ahead of her solo presentation with Niru Ratnam Gallery at Frieze London. “It’s a web where beings, objects, and even concepts are alive and connected.” Working primarily with moving images and digital environments, Lee constructs intricate worlds in 3D moving images, where the boundary between human and non-human dissolves into something both mythic and intimate, that captures wind through stone, sunlight across ruins, the quiet shimmer between breath and machine. They are built from real-time 3D environments, layered with sound, voice, and animation to create a sense of living atmosphere. “I want to move away from representing nature as a backdrop or subject and instead work towards creating environments where the non-human truly participates,” she says. “Each work should feel like an ecology in itself, where sound, image, matter, and breath interconnect like organisms in a shared habitat.”
At Frieze, Lee will showcase a trilogy, titled Lullaby of the Ruins, Forgiving the Sunlight, and Before the Shadow Taught the Sun, that traces a girl’s journey through decay and renewal: “Her journey is not linear but circular,” Lee explains. “She sees death, forgiveness, and transformation in different guises. The trilogy meditates on how life renews itself through decay.” The three films will merge into a single immersive environment. Rather than a narrative with a beginning or end, they loop continuously, allowing viewers to enter at any point and still feel, as Lee puts it, “the rhythm of return.” Within these shifting digital landscapes, she models ruins, temples, and recurring motifs of wings, hands, water, stone, wind. “These repetitions are like ritual refrains,” she says. “They suggest kinship among beings and continuity between life and matter.”
Her interest in these themes stems from early childhood experiences. “As a child, I spent most of my time outdoors, in the mountains and fields,” she recalls. “I remember feeling the movement of stones, reading to the wind or the trees… I even once felt I had lived as a mountain in a previous life.” What others might call fantasy, she calls perception. “For me, that wasn’t fantasy, it was simply how I related to the world.”
Through her ongoing collaboration with Google Arts & Culture and LAS Art Foundation, Lee is experimenting with artificial intelligence and biofeedback systems that respond to human presence, such as heartbeats, breath, and voice. “I want to investigate how technology might listen rather than simply calculate,” she explains. “I’m fascinated by the possibility that a digital environment could behave like a sentient landscape – one that shifts its atmosphere according to human presence.” This desire to blur the divide between human and non-human extends beyond concept into process. Lee often works collaboratively with sound artists, poets, and performers, describing these relationships as “spiritual gestures.” “Collaboration dissolves authorship,” she says. “It creates shared resonance. That’s what I want my work to be: a space that feels alive both biologically and metaphysically.”
While her work operates in a universal register, the dual geographies of London and Seoul form her artistic approach. “London gives me a sense of vastness and intellectual freedom,” she reflects. “It’s a place where experimentation is encouraged. Seoul grounds me in emotional instinct – there’s a density of time and intuition there that I find deeply nourishing.” Moving between the two, she says, is “almost ritualistic. London teaches me how to build structures; Seoul reminds me how to trust silence.” Asked what keeps her creating, Lee pauses, smiling softly before replying: “Astonishment. That the world continues to speak, even through its ruins. I’m moved by the small signs of life that persist – ashes that glitter, stones that hum, winds that remember. I create to listen back to that murmur.”
