Ruhee Lee

Ruhee Lee is an artist and researcher whose practice is rooted in movement and visual storytelling. Her work explores the intersections of the body, biotechnology, and identity, questioning how human life is perceived, categorized, and remembered. She currently engages in a practice that combines digital installations and sculptural forms to critically reframe these issues.

Project Title: Encoded

Project Description: Encoded is a sensory-based installation that challenges the societal tendency to reduce identity to biological information. The project originated from the artist’s personal experience of receiving unexpected ancestral data through DNA analysis. This moment prompted a fundamental question: Can scientific data truly explain who I am? It led to a perspective that sees identity not as a fixed fact, but as something constantly shifting, enacted, and performed.

In this biotechnological age, identity is increasingly defined and authenticated through scientific codes and classifications. As a result, we are confronted with the troubling reduction of the complex self into a mere sequence of genetic information. Grounded in a critical reflection on biometric surveillance and the racialization of data collection, this work asks: What is lost when identity is expressed solely through code? Inspired by speculative and performative artistic practices, the project reinterprets DNA not as a stable truth, but as an unstable archive—continuously rewritten through memory, perception, and power. 

The installation reveals the rupture between genetic data and lived human experience through an interface of light and sound, built from the artist’s own DNA sequence. LED lights illuminate in response to specific base pairs, while fragmented narration—spoken by overlapping AI and human voices—suggests that identity belongs not to fixed code, but to a sensory space of instability and incompleteness.

Academic Interests: Bioart and Biopolitics, Performance and Embodiment, Interdisciplinary Artistic Practice in Contemporary Art and Performance