Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Lee’s solo exhibitions include 《Kimberly the Optimist》 (Space 413, Seoul, 2021) and 《KIMBERLY EXTRACT》 (SeMA Storage, Seoul, 2021).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Lee has also participated in group exhibitions such as the 《2023 ARKO Art Center x Digital Art Festival Taipei Screening Program》 (ARKO Art Center, Seoul, 2023), 《The Postmodern Child》 (Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan, 2022–2023), 《Grid Island》 (Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2022), 《The Taming of The Shrew》 (Museumhead, Seoul, 2022), 《TYPOJANCHI 2021: A TURTLE AND A CRANE》 (Culture Station Seoul 284, Seoul, 2021), and 《Solicarity Spores》 (National Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, 2020).

Residencies (Selected)

Eunsol Lee was selected as an artist-in-residence in various residency programs, including the Korea National University of Arts Residency in 2024, Seoul Art Space Geumcheon in 2023, and SeMA Nanji Residency in 2022.

Originality & Identity

Eunsol Lee is an artist who has consistently focused on the ontological conditions of the digital age. A turning point in her practice was an incident in 2017, when her personal Instagram account was involuntarily altered—its name changed to “Kimberly” through hacking. From that point, the virtual character “Kimberly Lee,” which began appearing in her works, took root not simply as an avatar but as a digital lifeform that mediates the artist’s reflections and creations. Early works such as Happy Easter(2020–) treat this intruding digital object as a form of life, contemplating autonomy and conditions of existence within the digital world.

This ontological inquiry is materialized through its relationship with technological infrastructure. In the solo exhibition 《KIMBERLY EXTRACT》(SeMA Storage, Seoul, 2021), Kimberly is repeatedly placed in situations where she must survive between real-world spaces and digital environments. In these works, Kimberly often appears only as a head, raising the question of whether identity and consciousness can persist without a physical body. This philosophical investigation is particularly deepened in I want to be a cephalopod(2021), where references to traditional soul theory and bodily transplantation experiments are made.

Lee also employs the notion of “managing” a virtual identity to depict contemporary conditions where the boundaries between self and other, reality and virtuality, have become increasingly blurred. Popcorn Prophet trailer 001(2020–) illustrates the crisis and survival of a virtual character within a constructed reality based on the Unity engine, thereby raising questions about unstable technological environments and the mutability of selfhood. Through such works, the artist tracks and reconstructs the ethical and technical conditions that allow digital entities to “exist” within a contemporary social framework.

In her recent works, the focus shifts toward the possibility of digital beings forming communal relationships. In the group exhibition 《Grid Island》(Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2022), the work Kimberly & Friends(2022) explores how the virtual lifeform Kimberly operates within a collaborative, multi-agent system—particularly the structure of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). This suggests a shift in the artist’s interest from individual existence to network-based relationality and decentralization

Style & Contents

Lee’s work is composed through an expansive use of digital media, including video, VR, game engines, NFTs, and open-world social platforms. Early works such as Happy Easter(2020–) and Firefly(2021) utilize digital tools like Unity and Maya to reanimate the movements and sensations of her characters. The medium of video is not merely a technical choice, but actively intervenes in the content itself, granting temporality and narrative structure to her exploration of digital objecthood.

In the solo exhibition 《Kimberly the Optimist》(Space 413, 2021), the work Nanight(2021) records Kimberly’s movement through a hyper-optimized environment using a 360-degree video format that incorporates Nanite, the latest virtualized micropolygon geometry technology from Unreal Engine 5. Viewers experience the work through a VR headset, allowing them to sense the intricate connection between digital rendering and performance of survival. The technical conditions of these advanced game engines directly link to the conceptual notion of “optimization,” collapsing the boundary between technology and existence.

Lee has also conducted interactive experiments in which viewers participate directly as avatars, using open-world social platforms such as VRChat. My Cephalopod Friends(2021) is a work that explores the potential of collective actions in a low-resolution, roughly constructed environment. Despite its technical simplicity, the piece demonstrates how new meaning can be produced through interactivity and social engagement.

Her recent work Midnight Sun Daze(2023) adopts a two-channel video format, incorporating occult symbols, magical circles, and ritualistic sequences to imply the useless but potent value of art within digital space—standing outside the logic of capitalism. This reflects the immateriality and unrepresentability inherent to digital media, expanding its function beyond mere technical implementation into a tool of aesthetic resistance.

Topography & Continuity

Eunsol Lee’s body of work consistently engages with philosophical inquiries into the autonomy and ontological conditions of digital entities. Beginning with a hacked virtual identity and its reconfiguration, her practice has closely tied these ontological questions to technological experimentation. Her works concretely demonstrate how the notion of digital ontology can be manifested within the discourses of contemporary art.
In terms of form, Lee has centered video as her primary medium while swiftly incorporating game engines, VR, NFTs, and open-world games—not merely as tools, but as integral conceptual and structural components of her practice. Her approach is notable for avoiding subservience to technology, instead leveraging its ethical and aesthetic potential through a balanced artistic perspective.

Her trajectory can be summarized as a shift from personal identity to communal systems, and from ontological questions to decentralized ecosystems. The formation of experimental communities based on DAO structures operates as a critical gesture that challenges existing hierarchies and systems of ownership in the art world. Going forward, Lee is expected to continue traversing fluid boundaries between technology, capital, art, and existence through a digitally grounded artistic practice.