A meditation on consciousness, ecology, and the digital sublime.
Niru Ratnam gallery presents the complete trilogy of films by South Korean artist Eunjo Lee, screened for the first time as the continuous, unified vision the artist originally intended.
Comprising 'The Lullaby of the Ruins', 'When Forgiving the Sunlight', and 'Before the Shadow Taught the Sun', this triptych offers a moment of sustained contemplation inviting viewers into a world where the distinctions between organic matter, technological infrastructure, and spiritual consciousness begin to blur and ultimately dissolve.
Lee has developed a visual language that feels simultaneously ancient and radically contemporary. Drawing upon the sophisticated rendering capabilities of Unreal Engine and Blender, she constructs digital environments of startling beauty and uncanny resonance.
Lee's engagement with these technologies is neither celebratory nor critical in any simplistic sense; rather, she recognizes in the digital realm a unique capacity to materialize what theorist Bruno Latour might call a "parliament of things," a space where human and non-human actors can meet on more horizontal terms.
The trilogy's opening film, 'The Lullaby of the Ruins', establishes the conceptual and aesthetic parameters that will echo throughout the subsequent works. We encounter a landscape marked by environmental collapse, yet one that refuses the easy rhetoric of apocalyptic despair. Instead, Lee presents us with a child mourning the death of a stone—a gesture that immediately troubles our conventional understanding of what constitutes life, consciousness, and the capacity for loss. The film's inhabitants, creatures that merge rusted metal with antlered vegetation, move through this terrain with a deliberate, almost ritualistic quality, tending to an environment that exists somewhere between ruin and renewal.
'When Forgiving the Sunlight' deepens and complicates these themes through the figure of Heleah, whose ultimate sacrifice to a monstrous stone entity suggests not tragedy but transformation. The film's title itself carries a theological resonance, evoking acts of grace and redemption, yet Lee carefully avoids any simple religious allegory. Instead, she proposes something more radical: that ruins might function not merely as sites of loss but as thresholds where different forms of existence—organic, mineral, digital—can interpenetrate and give rise to new configurations of being. The stone that was once "alive," that is now "dead," and that might yet return to life through Heleah's sacrifice, becomes a figure for the endless circulation of matter and energy that characterizes both ecological systems and, increasingly, our digital infrastructures.
The trilogy's conclusion, 'Before the Shadow Taught the Sun', follows this logic to its most extreme articulation. Here, figures that are already hybrid—part-human, part-matter—undergo a final metamorphosis into pure light, a transformation that carries both mystical and technological connotations. In an era where consciousness studies increasingly grapple with questions of artificial intelligence and distributed cognition, Lee's vision of bodies becoming light resonates as more than mere visual poetry. It suggests the possibility of consciousness unmoored from biological substrate, existing instead as pattern, as information, as luminous presence.
What distinguishes Lee's trilogy most profoundly is its structural insistence on cyclicality, its refusal of linear narrative closure. The films are ultimately about the never-ending cycles of life and death, and the form of the trilogy itself becomes structurally essential to this vision. By presenting these three works as a continuous whole, Lee creates a temporal loop where endings become beginnings, where death perpetually gives way to new forms of life, and where transformation is revealed not as exception but as the fundamental condition of existence. This is not the closed circle of eternal recurrence but rather a spiral, where each iteration carries forward traces of what came before while opening onto genuinely new possibilities.
In this regard, Lee's work resonates powerfully with James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, which reconceives Earth not as a passive substrate for life but as a self-regulating, co-evolving system in which living organisms and their inorganic environment constitute a single, dynamic whole. Lovelock's vision challenges the notion of discrete, independent entities, proposing instead that we exist within—and as part of—a planetary system in perpetual transformation. Lee's trilogy visualizes this insight with remarkable precision. Her hybrid creatures, her stones that live and die, her cables with nerves and her minerals with blood, all embody the Gaian principle that life and non-life, organic and inorganic, exist not in opposition but in continuous, reciprocal exchange.
The trilogy's cyclical structure mirrors the feedback loops that characterize Gaian systems—the endless processes of regulation, adaptation, and co-evolution through which the planet maintains conditions conducive to life. Just as Lovelock demonstrated that Earth's atmosphere is not merely a chemical accident but the product of billions of years of biological activity, Lee suggests that consciousness itself might be understood as an emergent property of complex systems, whether those systems are ecological, technological, or some hybrid of the two. Her films propose that we are not observers of these cycles but participants in them, co-evolving alongside stones, machines, forests, and digital networks in a vast, interconnected web of becoming.
This perspective fundamentally reframes the environmental crisis that haunts the trilogy's post-apocalyptic landscapes. Rather than depicting humanity's separation from nature, Lee shows us a world where such separation was always illusory. The ruins that populate her films are not endings but transitions, sites where one configuration of the Gaian system gives way to another. The mourning child, the sacrificial protagonist, the bodies becoming light—all participate in transformations that are simultaneously deaths and births, losses and renewals. In this reading, even catastrophe becomes part of the system's capacity for self-organization and adaptation.
What makes this vision compelling rather than complacent is Lee's refusal to romanticize these processes. The slow, meditative pacing of the films, reinforced by their haunting soundscapes, creates a temporal experience utterly at odds with the accelerated rhythms of digital culture. This deliberate slowness is not nostalgic but strategic, creating the contemplative space necessary for viewers to register the philosophical stakes of what they're witnessing. We are invited to sit with discomfort, to acknowledge that co-evolution within a Gaian system does not guarantee human survival in any form we would recognize. The trilogy's perpetual cycles continue regardless of whether we participate in them consciously or unconsciously, willingly or unwillingly.
Perhaps most provocatively, the trilogy suggests that advanced technology, far from alienating us from nature or from more holistic ways of being, might actually provide the means to recover forms of consciousness that pre-modern societies took for granted. This is not a naive primitivism but a recognition that digital technologies, particularly those involving artificial intelligence and networked systems, increasingly exhibit properties—distributed agency, emergent behavior, non-hierarchical organization—that resonate with both ecological and Gaian worldviews. In Lee's vision, the blood of stones and the nerves of cables are not metaphors but literal descriptions of a world where consciousness permeates matter in all its forms, where the distinction between the living and the non-living becomes a question of degree rather than kind, and where we are always already embedded in systems of perpetual transformation.
What emerges from sustained engagement with Lee's trilogy is a vision of radical interconnectedness, one that challenges not only anthropocentrism but the very notion of discrete, bounded entities. The cyclical structure of the work—its insistence on being viewed as a continuous whole, its echoes and repetitions across the three films—becomes the formal embodiment of Lovelock's insight that Earth functions as a single, self-regulating organism. We are not witnessing three separate narratives but rather three perspectives on a single, ongoing process: the perpetual co-evolution of all entities within a living system.
The trilogy asks us to consider what forms of consciousness, community, and coexistence might become possible if we truly embraced our entanglement with the vast networks—ecological, technological, spiritual—that sustain and constitute us.
In an era defined by ecological crisis, technological transformation, and the urgent need to reimagine our relationship with the more-than-human world, Lee's work arrives as both diagnosis and speculation. It asks us to think in cycles rather than lines, in systems rather than individuals, in co-evolution rather than domination. The ruins that populate her films are not monuments to human failure but evidence of the planet's inexhaustible capacity for transformation. The hybrid creatures that tend these landscapes are not monsters but models for what we might become if we accept our place within the Gaian system rather than imagining ourselves above or outside it.
This is Lee's first presentation at Frieze, and it marks the London debut for Niru Ratnam gallery at the fair.
The timing feels significant. As the art world continues to grapple with questions of sustainability, technology, and the role of art in an age of planetary crisis, Lee's trilogy offers not answers but something potentially more valuable: a space for contemplation, a visual and conceptual vocabulary for thinking otherwise, and a reminder that the future, like the ruins that populate her films, remains radically open to transformation. In presenting these cycles without end, Lee invites us to recognize that we are not witnessing the death of a world but its perpetual becoming—a process in which we are not observers but active, co-evolving participants.
15-19 October - Frieze - Niru Ratman Gallery
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