Connecting people through art 

The Han Nefkens Foundation is pleased to invite you to the opening and artist talk of Eunhee Lee’s exhibition Colorless, Odorless at ILHAM Gallery on Saturday, 17 January, at 3:00 pm.

The event will open with an introduction by Han Nefkens, Founder of the Han Nefkens Foundation, followed by a conversation between Eunhee Lee and curator Yap Sau Bin.

The exhibition features two works: Colorless, Odorless (2024) and Machines Don’t Die (2022).

The video Colorless, Odorless is the result of Eunhee Lee receiving the Han Nefkens Foundation – Loop Barcelona Video Art Production Grant 2023, produced in collaboration with Fundació Joan Miró; Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing; MoCA Taipei; ILHAM Gallery, Kuala Lumpur; Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; and Art Hub Copenhagen.

Eunhee Lee (b. 1990, South Korea) creates experimental and documentary videos and films that explore the relationship between individuals, images, and technology within a social context. Technology, in her work, is not merely a product of science but a complex convergence of political and economic interests. Through observation, her practice seeks to understand the strange and often absurd world we inhabit.


Colorless, Odorless 無色無味 (2024)
Single-channel video, 4K, 54min, colour, sound 

The key elements of electronics, such as semiconductors and display components, are produced in “clean rooms,” which are spaces where environmental conditions, including dust, are controlled. However, workers in these clean and sanitised spaces are often exposed to chemicals that are seriously hazardous to their health. Unlike immediate catastrophes, diseases caused by the accumulation of chemicals often go unnoticed and develop slowly over generations. 
What was that sour-yet-sweet odour? Does "clean" mean that it only maximises production stability while being far from ensuring body safety? Ironically, it is only the memories of the bodies and the faint smells of the substances passing through the clean rooms that prove the invisible toxicity and dangers of these cutting-edge technology sites. 
Colorless, Odorless follows the work records and archival materials of victims of semiconductor biohazards to trace the smells and actions of substances that cameras cannot capture. To this end, the voices of Asian women and migrant workers, who are exposed to vulnerability, are heard. Testimonies of the past are overlaid on current symptoms, and the disaster repeats itself in other bodies and places. As multinational corporations move manufacturing plants to developing countries to lower not only labour costs but also the costs of safety standards and regulatory responses, industrial disasters are also globally transferred. 
Perhaps the future is not an abstract number, but something intertwined with specific bodies and matter. As high-tech industries lead the way in the globalisation of risk and exploitation in increasingly outsourced workplaces, Colorless Odorless attempts to map out the terrain of solidarity among victims, activists, and workers' unions in the face of these risks and exploitation.


Machines Don’t Die (2022)
Single-channel video, 20min 4sec, color, 2.1-channel sound

Machines Don’t Die is a documentary video about electronic waste and the industry that recycles the rare minerals and metals the machines contain. The work investigates and questions some of the impact and aftermath of digital production and consumption. What happens with the devices after they cease to function, are outdated, or just not fashionable anymore? The digital remains and waste need to be disposed of, which has become very problematic and complicated. The artist connects the whole recycling process of these digital objects with the history of natural resource extraction.