Eunsol Lee (b. 1988) has been creating artworks based on the ongoing process of constructing, maintaining, and sustaining a virtual character named “Kimberly Lee” within digital networks. Through this process, Lee explores the existential value of digital objects within a digital value system—an intricate web formed by the overlapping economic activities of individual online platforms. At the same time, she researches various platforms and future habitats, planning and executing living environments that ensure Kimberly’s survival within the network.

The name "Kimberly Lee" originated from an incident in 2017 when someone hacked Eunsol Lee's Instagram account and changed the account name to Kimberly—a change the artist did not notice for nearly a year. During that time, without Lee's awareness, Kimberly had begun to extend and replicate parts of her identity in that digital space. When Lee eventually regained access, Kimberly had already taken root in the active online ecosystem. 

Rather than erasing Kimberly’s traces or presence, Lee chose to manage Kimberly’s life—just like other avatar account administrators. Art critic Hur Hojeong explains, “Eunsol Lee respects the autonomous system that is an extension of reality as well as keeps certain distance from it and confronts Kimberly as a figure who lives in a parallel reality.”

This signifies the intervention of a virtual identity into the artist’s own life. Eunsol Lee has taken on the role of manager for the virtual entity Kimberly, focusing on the structural frameworks that sustain such a digital persona.
 
For example, Lee describes Kimberly as follows: 

“Because Kimberly is herself the very evidence of the intrusion—of hacking—she carries an aura of danger with her. At times, minor incidents such as another hack or even a drop in Unity’s stock price evoke a sense of crisis surrounding Kimberly. These issues are often rooted in skepticism and anxiety about emerging technological environments.”

The artist’s interest in reality and technological environments has been concretized through Kimberly, a character who exists solely as a head without a body. In her 2021 solo exhibition 《KIMBERLY EXTRACT》 at SeMA Storage, Eunsol Lee presented a series of works in which Kimberly is placed within various environments and made to survive within them. 

Lee captured and translated into video the moments of movement, metamorphosis, dismemberment, and synthesis performed by the digital lifeform Kimberly, who is situated in diverse settings defined by the artist. In the video work Firefly (2021), the virtual entity adapts to its surroundings—resting in a bathtub, lying on a bed, or creating a soft magic circle in an attempt to transform ruins into a new environment.

Virtual characters like Kimberly, who exist only as heads, flit about like fireflies—glowing briefly before disappearing. These works form part of a series of experimental projects in which Kimberly, as an independent entity, is tested for survival within technological environments. Through these attempts, the artist traces and documents Kimberly’s process of shaping a multi-reality existence. 

However, Kimberly's autonomy as a complete subject often ends in failure. The video work I want to be a cephalopod (2021) metaphorically explores the existence of the virtual lifeform Kimberly through a dialogue between two disembodied heads. In their conversation, they refer to traditional soul theories and the body transplantation experiments of Robert Joseph White, who worked on monkeys, in order to reflect on the relationship between soul and body.

The text within the video delves into whether the mind or soul is connected to the entire body or originates solely from the brain (or head). It raises a critical question: if reality is assumed to be the body and virtuality the head, can Kimberly truly exist independently?

Today, as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin influence the tangible economy, and virtual spaces like the metaverse treat virtual and real infrastructures as equivalent, the interrelationship between the real and the virtual continues to deepen—blurring the boundaries between the two more than ever. 

In this context, Eunsol Lee has continually experimented with optimizing the virtual entity Kimberly to flexibly adapt and survive within various virtual environments. According to the artist, this “optimization” refers to “finding the appropriate degree of value that enables the most effective performance within a suitable environment.”

In Eunsol Lee’s second solo exhibition, 《Kimberly the Optimist》, held at Space 413 in 2021, the artist explored the process of upgrading Kimberly’s optimized state in response to various given environments, using virtual platforms and game engines such as VRChat, Instagram, and Unreal Engine 5. 
One notable work, Nanight (2021), is a 360-degree video set within a modified promotional environment showcasing Unreal Engine’s Nanite technology. Nanite is a virtualized micropolygon geometry system that enables real-time rendering of hyper-detailed visuals optimized for a gamer's screen.  

Within the video, Kimberly continually moves through this dramatically optimized environment, a space where technological precision meets visual intensity. Lee captured these scenes in 360-degree video and transferred them to the Oculus VR headset, allowing viewers to immerse themselves in Kimberly’s journey toward optimization.

Meanwhile, My Cephalopod Friends (2021) is a work in the open-world game genre, featuring a shallow and roughly constructed environment but utilizing the social virtual world platform VRChat, where diverse interactions between users can take place. In VRChat, the audience navigates the virtual world created by the artist alongside other users, embodied as the braided-hair avatar named Kimberly.

Kimberly’s infinite movement within the digital interface leads to a deeper exploration of her existence. The poem Tremble-Fly (Third Cisfinitum) (1930) by the Russian avant-garde and absurdist poet Daniil Kharms, which was inscribed on the exhibition wall, serves as a metaphor for Kimberly’s existence expanding into infinite realms. 

Kharms expresses various living creatures, objects, and even the flow of time in a fluid and nonlinear tense, encouraging us to imagine infinite realms beyond logical and orderly space-time. Through this, the artist guides the audience to move toward Kimberly who exists “right there.”

Furthermore, in 2022, Eunsol Lee presented a new work, Kimberly & Friends (2022), at the group exhibition 《Grid Island》 held at the Seoul Museum of Art. Kimberly, who had previously occupied the virtual world as a single entity guided by one operator, began to engage with others through this work. 

To form Kimberly’s network, Eunsol Lee assembled a team consisting of Pack.system, Seunghyun Lee, KIMSOOHIE, Jeong Jinhwa, SOLLEE KIM, and Aggie Nam. Together, they created and operated a decentralized network separate from central control, organizing a community in the form of a Web 3.0 solidarity model known as a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization).

They sought to establish a foundation for Kimberly’s survival and expansion by reflecting on contemporary art production methods and transparent, sustainable asset management. Based on this, they set common goals possible within a crypto-based community and established rules for how to distribute shares in their collaborative relationships.
 
Kimberly & Friends documents the process of the so-called “Kimberly DAO Co-Parenting Project.” The team issued five NFTs and experienced a beta-form DAO, presenting the process through promotional videos and a text wall. Each member contributed to producing videos and texts in their own way, and these contributions are all reflected in the resulting NFTs. 

The decentralized network-based Kimberly co-parenting community creates conditions where cryptocurrency can be reasonably traded, moving away from the logic of traditional capitalism to stabilize prices according to newly agreed-upon standards.

Even though it is attempted within a virtual world, the logic of capital inevitably intervenes, which can give rise to a sense of optimism. However, Eunsol Lee builds upon art as anti-exchange value—valued precisely for its uselessness and futility. The video work Midnight Sun Daze (2023) encapsulates this strategy. The magical circles and occult elements appearing in the video serve as metaphors for art, while the figures depicted as demons or witches appear as allegories of Web 3.0’s anarchistic vision.

The midnight sun, which forms the background of the video, metaphorically represents the continuously operating online world, where Kimberly’s cephalopod friends set out in search of the aurora. Embarking on an aurora journey during the summer with the midnight sun implies that their quest is arduous and not guaranteed to succeed. Nevertheless, Kimberly’s journey with her companions in search of the aurora resonates with the journey of Eunsol Lee and her collaborators.
 
In this way, Eunsol Lee explores Kimberly’s potential to transform into infinite forms and expand into infinite spaces through collaboration with multidisciplinary, multi-media creators. Together, they traverse various paths that disrupt the flows of creation and capital in both online and offline worlds, as illuminated by Kimberly. 

Beginning with skepticism toward the online world, dominated by the infrastructure and capital logic of large platform corporations, Lee’s work depicts the survival journey of digital objects with anti-exchange value within the digital value system. This invites us to imagine new ethics and modes of existence that fluidly traverse the boundaries between technology and art, reality and virtuality.

 ”These days, when we talk about digital ontology, we talk about networks. In the past, the idea was that the only truth was the self that questions — the “I” existed because I was aware of myself. But nowadays, identity is concretized through networks. Digital existence is something that lies in the space between others and myself, a kind of point of contrast. The “point” I’m talking about isn’t this point or that point — it’s something floating somewhere in between, and by existing just like that, it becomes a point of infinity.”  (Eunsol Lee, from an interview with Space 413)

Eunsol Lee graduated from the Department of Fine Art at the Korea National University of Arts and earned a master’s degree in video art from the same university’s graduate school. Her solo exhibitions include 《Kimberly the Optimist》 (Space 413, Seoul, 2021) and 《KIMBERLY EXTRACT》 (SeMA Storage, Seoul, 2021).
 
She has also participated in group exhibitions such as the 《2023 ARKO Art Center x Digital Art Festival Taipei Screening Program》 (ARKO Art Center, Seoul, 2023), 《The Postmodern Child》 (Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan, 2022–2023), 《Grid Island》 (Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2022), 《The Taming of The Shrew》 (Museumhead, Seoul, 2022), 《TYPOJANCHI 2021: A TURTLE AND A CRANE》 (Culture Station Seoul 284, Seoul, 2021), and 《Solicarity Spores》 (National Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, 2020). 

Eunsol Lee was selected as an artist-in-residence in various residency programs, including the Korea National University of Arts Residency in 2024, Seoul Art Space Geumcheon in 2023, and SeMA Nanji Residency in 2022.

References

• 이은솔, Eunsol Lee (Artist Website)
• 김시우, 머리 없는 도상, 혹은 머리 그 자체에 관해
• 서울시립미술관, 이은솔 개인전 “KIMBERLY EXTRACT” (Seoul Museum of Art, Eunsol Lee Solo Exhibition “KIMBERLY EXTRACT”) 
• 아트바바, 공간 사일삼 – 이은솔 개인전: Kimberly: 수렴으로 최적화 (Artbava, Space 413 – Eunsol Lee Solo Exhibition: Kimberly the Optimist) 
• 서울시립미술관, 그리드 아일랜드 (Seoul Museum of Art, Grid Island) 
• 허호정, 백야의 두족류, 오로라를 찾아서, 친구들과 합체