Eunjo Lee x HERVISIONS
To mark HERVISIONS’ first project of the year, the femme-focused art curatorial agency has commissioned London-based South Korean artist Eunjo Lee to create a trilogy of 3D animated films exploring cycles of death and rebirth in the tangible, mythical and digital realms.
Still from Eunjo Lee’s commission for HERVISIONS. Courtesy of the artist.
Three non-human beings—The Keeper, The Eaten One, and The Birthing One—traverse landscapes of ruins, temples, and divine factories, each pursuing a fragmented internal image inherited from the collective unconscious. Through ritualistic transformations, they ultimately converge in a shared space, yet fail to recognise one another—revealing the rupture of shared mythology in our fragmented digital present.
Since 2015, HERVISIONS has positioned itself at the intersection where social media becomes native artistic medium—where filters, loops, and vertical video constitute new aesthetic languages rather than technical limitations. From pioneering AR face filter exhibitions to pandemic-era digital programs, the agency has consistently understood platforms like Instagram and TikTok not merely as distribution channels but as sites where new forms of collective dreaming and ritual participation become possible.
Lee's work inherits the aesthetics of corecore—that TikTok-native genre where rapid montages attempt to articulate overwhelming emotional states through compressed symbolic language.
Like corecore's affective collages, each one-minute episode delivers immediate impact designed for circulation and repetition. But where corecore typically traffics in nihilistic fragmentation through appropriated imagery, Lee constructs entirely new worlds through 3D animation, transforming fragmentary logic into generative ritual. The beings' bodies function as vessels for collective mourning and regeneration—simultaneously ruin and sanctuary—expressing what corecore can only gesture at: that within endless death-cycles, something continuously births anew through the very act of circulation.
Inspired by Amazonian rituals where communities would sit around fire visualising the same form collectively, Lee asks whether such shared inner images can still be accessed in an age of algorithmic feeds.
‘In this work I redirect the defining brevity and loops of short-form media toward mythmaking, questioning whether the collective visualisation of ancient rituals remains accessible amidst our algorithmic feeds. By prioritising archetypal resonance over narrative comprehension, the work’s rapid pace opens a passage that returns us to a pre-linguistic, communal image.’ – Eunjo Lee
Still from Eunjo Lee’s commission for HERVISIONS. Courtesy of the artist.
Lee's approach acknowledges that contemporary ritual participation happens through digital platforms, through replicated and mutated content, through the "poor image" that gains power through accessibility rather than resolution. Her work explores how circulation itself becomes a form of collective witnessing—where viewers don't simply consume content but participate in its mythic regeneration through sharing, looping, and transformation across networks.
This commission represents HERVISIONS' evolution—from early experiments with social media as exhibition space to theoretically grounded explorations of how short-form digital culture can facilitate collective imagination. It honours the agency's decade-long commitment to understanding circulation, compression, and designed virality not as corruptions of artistic practice but as contemporary tools for creating shared mythologies.
Lee transforms the grammar of social media short-form into sacred technology, where each one-minute episode functions as a symbolic meme designed for viral mutation—rebirth occurring not despite but through the fragmentation and endless replication that defines contemporary digital culture.
Still from Eunjo Lee’s commission for HERVISIONS. Courtesy of the artist.
Still of Agony of EROS / DRIFT by Sofia Albina Novikoff Unger.
In partnership with HERVISIONS, Shoreditch Arts Club will premiere the works by Eunjo Lee on our prominent screens in February, with an opening night in presence of the artist, and HERVISIONS director Zaiba Jabbar. The work will be on view with original sound designer Harry Charlton.
Alongside the unique trilogy is a complementary screening of Sofia Albina Novikoff Unger's short film 'Agony of Eros / DRIFT' in our cinema, articulating common themes from within the lens of cyborgness and technology and different temporalities.
‘Agony of Eros / DRIFT’ makes use of localised and cloud-based AI technology and is a queer search-for-love narrative in a cyborg age set within a hyper-modernist society—where narcissism and capitalism disrupt genuine love by eradicating the desire for the Other as something different from oneself—an argument inspired by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han.
About Eunjo Lee Eunjo Lee is a visual artist working across 3D animation, interactive media, and mythological storytelling. Based between Seoul and London, her practice explores how digital technologies can become sites for ritual, collective memory, and pre-linguistic archetypal experience.
About HERVISIONS Founded in 2015 by curator and director Zaiba Jabbar, HERVISIONS is a femme-focused curatorial agency and platform supporting artists working at the intersection of art, technology, and culture.
This commission is supported by Arts Council England. All images courtesy of the artist.
