ACT alumna Jae Rhim Lee (SMVisS ’06), a visual artist, designer, and researcher, will be featured in the upcoming exhibition The Posthuman City: Climates. Habitats. Environments. held by the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore. Lee is the founder of Coeio, a company created to promote her Infinity Burial Suit, a suit designed with a new strain of fungus meant to feed on and remediate the industrial toxins stored in our bodies and convert corpses into clean compost.
My Mushroom Burial Suit, Jae Rhim Lee, TEDGlobal 2011.
The Posthuman City features a number of artists working to understand how global urbanization and the exploitation of resources affect the complex systems in our climate and environment and will feature Lee’s Infinity Burial Suit.
In an excerpt from the press release from the exhibition about Lee’s work:
“Death, from a post-humanist perspective, is not only inevitable and part of life, but is an event that is already in our past. The artist and entrepreneur Jae Rhim Lee developed a burial suit as an environmentally-conscious alternative to conventional funerary processes, shifting the negative narratives around death. The presented Infinity Burial Suit, a handcrafted garment that is worn by the deceased, is completely biodegradable, and co-created with zero waste fashion designer Daniel Silverstein. In addition, the Forever Spot Pet Shroud is featured, also consisting of a built in biomix of mushrooms and other microorganisms that together do three things: aid in decomposition, work to neutralise toxins found in dead bodies, and transfer nutrients to plant life, enriching the earth and fostering new life. Highlighting the importance of decompiculture—the cultivation of waste-decomposing organisms—, this project also suggests a strong link between human resistance to mortality and climate change denial. She advocates for a post-mortem responsibility towards the natural world and a direct engagement with our own mortality, making funerals new beginnings instead of endpoints, becoming more emotionally and socially accessible…”
The Posthuman City: Climates. Habitats. Environments. runs from November 23, 2019, to March 8, 2020.
