Unrealist's Europe - K-ARTIST

Unrealist's Europe

2024
Real-time simulation utilizing eye-tracking device, Single-play
Dimension variable
About The Work

SANGHEE has explored the concrete sensations of temporality—marked by generations or eras—and the collective narratives entangled with those sensations through interactive media activated by viewer participation. Employing VR, performance, real-time simulation, and photographic media, SANGHEE’s works engage audiences as players, prompting them to embody the given game-like rules and thereby transforming the exhibition space into a shared allegory of reality.
 
Artist has been experimenting with various interactive works to explore what constitutes a shared emotion that can be co-created and experienced through interfaces, and how corporeality can be sensed within virtual worlds.
 
In her practice, the communal experiences formed through audience participation do not remain isolated events; they accumulate like strata within the physical exhibition space. Even in moments when visitors are not fully aware, they remain entangled in multiple layers of experience, fostering a sense of co-creation that extends beyond the self.
 
Her work revives the awareness that, even in contemporary conditions where connections with others are increasingly tenuous and personal boundaries more defined, we still live in step with others and share perspectives, moving together through space and experience.

Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

SANGHEE has held solo exhibitions including 《Unrealist’s Europe》 (Artspace HYEONG7, Seoul, 2024), 《Conversational Map for Encounters: Bugs of Nostalgia》 (Faction, Seoul, 2024), and 《Worlding···》 (AVP Lab, Seoul, 2023).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

SANGHEE has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《ISEA 2025》 (Hangaram Design Museum, Seoul Arts Center, Seoul, 2025), 《Young Korean Artists 2025: Here and Now》 (MMCA, Gwacheon, 2025), 《Pack-Unpack》 (Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, 2024), 《Heterophony: A Decade of Song》 (Gwangju Media Art Platform, Gwangju, 2024), 《Big Brother Blockchain》 (Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin, 2024), and 《Who Owns the Truth? 》 (POSTCITY, Linz, Austria, 2023).

Awards (Selected)

In 2023, she received the Award of Distinction in the New Animation category at Prix Ars Electronica.

Residencies (Selected)

Since 2023, SANGHEE has co-led the artist collective Line of Piers with narrative designer Seonghun, and in 2024, the collective participated in the ACC (Asia Culture Center) Residency Program.

Collections (Selected)

SANGHEE’s work is included in the collections of the Seoul Museum of Art.

Works of Art

The Concrete Sensations of Temporality

Originality & Identity

SANGHEE’s practice re-asks the conditions of “being together” as an issue of relationships rather than of technology. In Oneroom-Barbel (2022), she reconstructs Seoul youths’ “one-room life” from interviews and scan data, weaving memories of migration and independence into an architectural narrative. Viewers (players) dive through a virtual undersea structure and unlock jellyfish-like objects to read others’ sentences and everyday traces. The work translates housing precarity and generational affect into the sensory language of VR, and, by producing a barrier-free version, makes the goal of “accessible empathy” explicit.

Subsequently, Worlding··· (2023–2024) sidesteps the myth of “real-time synchronicity.” Players repeatedly bury a giant’s corpse in a swamp with their bare hands and confront the aging of their VR hands. The results of individual play accumulate—after a delay—as floor topographies and projections in the gallery, so that each person’s repetition converges into a “shared terrain.” It turns the feelings of boredom and depletion into a mode of collective making.

In the 2024 solo exhibition 《Conversational Map for Encounters: Bugs of Nostalgia》 (Faction), she experiments with “world-building through conversation” via a TRPG format. In Conversational Map for Encounters (2024), audience-players traverse a fictional “hometown,” updating a map with stickers and notations. Each session’s revised map becomes the backdrop for the next session, depositing multiple narrative strata on the surface. In the same year, Unrealist’s Europe (2024) revisits the “gesture of tourism” with eye-tracking and pedal interfaces, exposing the anxiety and desire of a gaze oscillating between blur and focus.

The recent Keep Pace with Me, Wanderer (2025), presented in the group exhibition 《Young Korean Artists 2025: Here and Now》 at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, centers on the “sense of walking together.” Players adjust speed with a physical interface to match others’ strides. Moving beyond the accompany/not-accompany binary, it proposes “tempo tuning” as a technology of solidarity, extending the artist’s focus from “encountering others’ stories” to “learning to match rhythms with others.”

Style & Contents

SANGHEE’s primary media have expanded from VR to TRPG/simulation and hybrid installation. The early Oneroom-Barbel combines LiDAR scans, voice, and text to design a single-player structure; through the game-like rule of “dive—explore—unlock,” it lets players experience the layers of domestic life.

Worlding··· introduces hand tracking so bodily gestures become the main input, and it materializes results as paper printouts, floor terrains, and screen images. The network operates not for synchronization but as a protocol of “latency and accumulation,” depositing digital actions into the gallery’s material strata.

In 2024 the media spectrum widens. The TRPG-based Conversational Map for Encounters centers a “map-interface” composed of a plywood structure, roll paper, and stickers, mixing rule reading, adjudication, and improvisational acting to braid performance, game, and archiving. Unrealist’s Europe anatomizes the tourist gesture of “seeing–taking” via eye-tracking and a pedal interface, while postcards generated by viewers gradually fill the exhibition space.

Keep Pace with Me, Wanderer combines a local-network real-time simulation with physical controllers and a pavilion. Instead of dialogue choices, it offers “speed” as a continuous parameter, and after each session, companionship data is shared on a leaderboard—so individual experiences culminate in a collective record.

Topography & Continuity

SANGHEE works across VR, games, and TRPGs, calibrating relationships not through technological spectacle but through accessible rules, slow performativity, and residual data. Her shift of the “interactive” from instant reaction to co-editing and accumulation is especially effective.

She forges a distinctive approach in “producing and recording shared sensibilities through interfaces.” Procedural devices—game rules, data outputs, map editing, leaderboards—position viewers as users and co-authors, converting individual experiences into the gallery’s material strata. This moves beyond the common contemporary Korean media-art equation of participation with one-off experience, proposing a cyclic protocol in which the outcome of one participation structures the next.

Spanning institutional shows such as 《ISEA 2025》 (Hangaram Design Museum, 2025) and 《Young Korean Artists 2025: Here and Now》, and international platforms including the Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction in New Animation (2023) and a Venice Immersive invitation (2023), SANGHEE has built a model that links research, design, and exhibition. Inclusive design (the barrier-free version of Oneroom-Barbel) and thoughtful adoption of local networks/low-latency hardware also underpin the sustainability of her practice. Looking ahead, she is poised to advance hybrid models connecting game studies, performance, and data art, continually reconfiguring the exhibition as a site for rehearsal, recording, and collaborative editing.

Works of Art

The Concrete Sensations of Temporality

Exhibitions

Activities