Inhwa Yeom, Solarsonic Band, 2024, 3D Performative Apparatus-Environment (PC-based VR, mobile AR, stainless steel, mirrored and crystallic apparatuses), Installation view of Unfold X 2024 《2084: Space Odyssey》 (Culture Station Seoul 284, 2024) ©Unfold X

Inhwa Yeom is a media artist and researcher who reconstructs the experiences of historical minorities through technology. Through XR (extended reality)[1] and AI-based “3D performative apparatus-environments,” she provides a stage on which visitors can perform roles other than themselves. In doing so, participants experience a range of minority-centered existences and continue to interact with the media.

The term “3D performative apparatus-environment,” which Yeom coined and has repeatedly used, is a key concept for describing her practice. She emphasizes it not to foreground the technologies themselves but to highlight the performativity of the audience’s experience within the medium. Yeom explains that labeling works with technical terms like XR or AI dilutes the intended performative element, and thus she devised this terminology.

She describes her work as “nothing other than an apparatus and environment designed like a stage to induce the audience’s performative experience.”
The artist avoids head-mounted displays (HMDs), instead building primarily PC- and mobile-based XR environments. This is because the limited number of HMDs can impose physical constraints on visitors who are not wearing them. That said, she has announced that a new work slated for 2025 will employ HMDs, judging that, within that project’s narrative, the device will more effectively elicit performative participation.

Solarsonic Band (2024) is an XR-based participatory performance. The band in the work rehearses performances as it tours five spheres of the climate crisis—the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, cryosphere, and biosphere. In this process, visitors take on the role of band leader. A score generated from climate data shifts according to the leader’s real-time interactions and performance, functioning as a climate-crisis scenario. At a time when a “wait-and-see”[2] attitude toward the climate crisis is pervasive, Solarsonic Band proposes a more participatory and proactive stance.

Inhwa Yeam, SAUNA LAB, 2023, 3D Performative Apparatus-Environment (multi-channel video, projector, TV monitor, chair) ©Inhwa Yeom

Meanwhile, Innerveauty Spa (2023) unfolds a narrative that offers neuro-care services for clients with diverse neurotypes. Visitors perform the role of a spa practitioner and, through XR devices, attend to clients. Using an AR-based tablet, the practitioner follows a customized care manual, tuning in, channeling, and resonating with each client’s concerns and needs.

Inhwa Yeam, Coco Killing Island: A Gourmet Tour, 2023, 3D Performative Apparatus-Environment ©Inhwa Yeom

Other representative works include Impostor Kitchen (2022), in which participants play staff at a restaurant themed around aging, and Coco Killing Island: A Gourmet Tour (2022). Yeom explores themes such as biotech, the climate crisis, neurodiversity, and critical psychiatry, focusing on the different beings that visitors can “become” and the real-world possibilities that such becoming may open.

Inhwa Yeam, Imposter Kitchen, 2023, 3D Performative Apparatus-Environment ©Inhwa Yeom

Speaking with Yeom reveals that she works while keeping boundless possibilities in view. Imagination forms and drifts at the core of her practice, a tendency especially evident in SAUNA LAB (2024). Noting how scientific and technological capital concentrates in particular classes, she imagines what might happen if such capital were shared freely with those vulnerable to the climate crisis.

SAUNA LAB—envisioned as a community climate-research lab that repurposes the scientific-research capital and hot-spring facilities of Yuseong-gu, Daejeon—is a place where older adults and future generations study the climate crisis together. Renaming the “climate-crisis vulnerable” as “climate-crisis survivors,” Yeom has these elders speak about climate solutions using humorous language[3] instead of the specialized jargon of synthetic biology.

Inhwa Yeam, Innerveauty Spa, 2023, 3D Performative Apparatus-Environment (PC-based VR, Mobile AR, Installation), Installation view of 《Planetary Pulse》 (Aisa Culture Center, 2023)

Most existing local-resource-linked and citizen-led research labs, both in Korea and abroad, have operated with support and cooperation from governments and research institutions. What deserves attention here is that labs grounded in alternative, post-capitalist thinking often fail to endure.

In a world where endeavors without economic viability quickly stall, what might society look like if values other than capital circulated like currency? For Yeom, this is more than an absent reality. In other words, she persuades us that such imaginings are not unrealistic but imminently possible.



[1] XR: the interconnection and operation of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).
[2] Gitanshu Choudhary and Varun Dutt point out a prevalent tendency to defer or offload responsibility for the climate crisis, describing a pronounced “wait-and-see” stance.
[3] The speaker in the work uses a mode of speech often dismissed as subcultural. Yeom notes that expressions outside normative language can become new standards as their user base grows; the humorous language and memes in her work are frequently used online, attesting to their contemporaneity.

References