Originality & Identity

Kim Uljiro reorganizes how “material/immaterial” operates at the seam of reality and the virtual into a new, life-like metaphor. Made during the pandemic, NULL player(2020) replaces street canvassing with AR, testing how invisible, noiseless campaign gestures can still occupy public space. She then overlays the microstructures of carnivorous plants with digital rendering logics in N. rafflesiana sema(2021) and N. rafflesiana sema-micro(2021) to propose a “virtual incubator,” while Hyper-morphogenesis β(2022) observes microorganism-like systems emerging from data–physics simulations, visualizing the paradox of organisms that “both exist and do not.”

This approach deepens by juxtaposing plant self-replication and networks with digital image-generation rules. The Trace of Ferns(2022) connects a dancer’s motion trajectories to an L-system plant algorithm, turning the human body into a “spore substrate,” and A Three-dimensional Preparat(2022) designs the ACC Media Wall as a “digital terrarium” split above/below ground, positioning viewers as nutrient carriers—i.e., participants in the growth mechanism. In the solo show 《Potting》 (Re:Plat, 2023), she questions the sleek graphic conventions akin to the aesthetic breeding of “indoor plants,” exposing glitches and low surface densities to overturn the notion of a “corrected nature” (Soil mixing(2023), Sequence(2023)).

At MMCA’s 《What Things Dream About》 (MMCA, 2024), Garden of Mechanical Sun(2024) pushes a pixel/seed equivalence: by connecting a solar-plant circuit to a 3D system, pixels “grow” into units and clusters, summoning a scale of imagination where life and data are indistinguishable. Most recently at 《Young Korean Artists 2025: Here and Now》 (MMCA, 2025), the new works Similia Similibus Curantur(2025), Herald of the Compound Eye(2025), and Creeping Pulse(2025) cross-project orchid symbiosis, pollination, and creeping with the perceptual/reproductive conditions of digital media, formalizing nonhuman viewpoints and temporalities that unsettle anthropocentric classification. In short, Kim translates “virtual–real transition” into the languages of growth, creeping, and differentiation, arguing convincingly that the digital can be “another kind of ecology.”

Style & Contents

The early NULL player recodes the definition of “space occupation = action” via the AR-filter interface, while Hyper-morphogenesis β treats the software’s virtual physics engine like a lab, re-importing the natural-history method of observe–collect–record. The Trace of Ferns braids motion capture, L-system, and sound to synthesize a gesture/plant interplay, and A Three-dimensional Preparat organizes vertical circulation, luminous surfaces, and split screens as if mirroring root/stem/leaf hierarchies to architect a “plant-display.”

Her digital material choices are strategic. 《Potting》 foregrounds “contamination values” typically scrubbed in post—surface density, texture seams, noise, glitches—to upend the hygienic equation “perfect render = healthy plant.” Sequence specimens frame-by-frame byproducts on transparent paper, microscopically exposing the invisible labor and procedures of graphic production.

Garden of Mechanical Sun translates a closed loop of energy–matter–information into form. Distributing solar panel/plant/pixel conversions across a four-channel video, it synchronizes “growth–accumulation–differentiation” rhythms audiovisually, sensorially proving that pixel collectivities (clustering, tiling) resemble seed colonies. At 《Young Korean Artists 2025: Here and Now》, new works maximize medium specificity—LED panel, single-channel video, speed control (slow/long take)—to assign technical axes to insect vision (Herald of the Compound Eye), temporal afterimage (Creeping Pulse), and symbiotic dependency (Similia Similibus Curantur). In sum, Kim’s media-art grammar converges on procedural generation, the embrace of error-materiality (glitch, low-res), and ecological architecture (terrarium-like displays), thereby enacting its content—nonhuman perception and a data–life equivalence.

Topography & Continuity

Her practice can be distilled as “thinking the digital as ecology.” It starts from AR-based social experiments (NULL player), evolves into microscopic organisms (Hyper-morphogenesis β) and plant–algorithm couplings (The Trace of Ferns, A Three-dimensional Preparat), then moves to a critique of “render hygiene” via amplified noise (《Potting》) and to an energy–pixel–seed analogy (Garden of Mechanical Sun). Most recently, it has been refined through the mutual translation of orchid biology and digital perception (Similia Similibus Curantur, Herald of the Compound Eye, Creeping Pulse), developing a distinctive methodology that summons nonhuman times and viewpoints.

Positioned against a media-art/tech tendency to collapse into “efficiency and realism,” Kim persistently tests the crossing of biological imagination with procedural image generation. This independent trajectory links tightly to posthuman discourse, the botanical turn, and HCI/game-engine exhibition making, while expanding an installation grammar that casts viewers as “mediators” within growth systems. By consistently pressing the proposition “digital = other ecology” across aesthetics, technology, and exhibition form, her work stands as a contemporary model that dismantles the real/virtual and natural/artificial binary.