Jae Rhim Lee

Jae Rhim Lee

Brooklyn, NY

Jae Rhim Lee is a transdisciplinary artist, designer and inventor. Her living units, furniture, wearables and recycling systems propose unorthodox relationships between the mind/body/self and the built and natural environment and critically engage institutions such as FEMA (US Federal Emergency Management Agency), the City of New Orleans hurricane recovery office and the funeral industry. She is the founder of the Infinity Burial Project and inventor of the Mushroom Death Suit and the COEO-POD. Lee is a TED Fellow and a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley.

Infinity Burial Project


Jae Rhim Lee is a transdisciplinary artist, designer and inventor.

Artist Bio

The Infinity Burial Project explores the choices we face post-mortem and how our choices reflect our denial or acceptance of death’s physical and psychological implications. The two components include a modest proposal in physical form for a new land and energy independent burial system. The Infinity Burial System converts corpses into useable biomethane gas, detoxifies the corpse using a new hybrid mushroom (Infinity Mushroom), and creates clean compost. The Infinity Mushroom, a future hybrid mushroom will perform three functions: to decompose bodies, to remediate the accumulated industrial toxins in bodies, and to deliver nutrients from bodies to plant roots. The second component includes a documentary film about death denial, cryonics (the ultimate form of death denial), the development of the Infinity Burial System (the antidote to death denial), and Lee’s own confrontation with death through illness while she develops the Infinity Burial System.


Discipline
Ecological Art
Award Year
2009
Status

In Progress