Neither Here nor There: Chaeyeon Kang on Digital-Physical Hybridity and the Fluidity of Being

By Cansu Waldron

Chaeyeon Kang explores the fragile intersection of body, memory, and digital-physical hybridity. Working across printmaking and experimental media, she investigates cycles of vulnerability and resilience through her own female bodily experiences and virtual female bodies. Through collage and layering, she pursues sensations that can’t be captured through traditional methods alone, gravitating toward materials and images that exist in liminal spaces — never fully one thing or the other.

Chaeyeon’s work moves between print and painting, digital images and physical surfaces, and real and virtual bodies. Her practice pushes against binary systems rather than adapting to them; she wants media and institutions to adjust to the hybrid approach she proposes until it feels familiar. At the core of her work is a persistent question: Who gets to define what is what — and do we need those definitions at all?

We asked Chaeyeon about her art, creative process, and inspirations.

[Kangchaeyeon_Chirr1_digital monotype 29.7x42cm2023]

Can you tell us about your background as a digital artist? How did you get started in this field?

I started with traditional drawing and painting, but during the pandemic, I worked on indie games and VR performance set design. Experiencing virtual bodies for the first time and reflecting on my own unnamed autoimmune condition sparked my interest in the ironic ways bodies desire and affect each other. Naturally, this led me to use digital tools, combining AR filters, digital traces, and virtual idol bodies with traditional media, using collage and layering to explore new sensations that couldn’t be captured through traditional methods alone.

21gm dance 1, 21x29.7cm, digital monotype, 2024

Your work moves between the physical and the digital — printmaking and virtual bodies. What draws you to this space in between?

I’ve always been fascinated by things that exist on the edge. Materials, media, and images that don’t fully belong to one side but linger in between. I believe new possibilities emerge in that gap, and I continue to explore it. My work moves between print and painting, digital images and physical surfaces, and real and virtual bodies. When a digital image is transferred onto a physical surface, it’s neither entirely virtual nor fully material. This approach can still confuse people. Even when submitting portfolios or exhibition applications, I often ask myself, “Am I a printmaker, a painter, or an image artist?” And people always ask back, “So is this print, painting, or photography?” I think that confusion itself is important. The fact that this question keeps coming up shows how much the art world still relies on hierarchical systems of media and classification. My practice is about challenging those hierarchies, not adapting to them. I want media and institutional classifications to adapt to the hybrid approach I propose until it becomes familiar. I constantly ask myself, “Who has the right to define what is what? And do we really need definitions at all?”

21gm dance 2, water based ink on digital monotype, Diasec, 60x85cm, 2024

How has your understanding of the body changed through your experiments with digital forms?

Working with digital forms has allowed me to view my own body more positively. In a way, it’s become a journal, a place to process and face my body. At first, I hated my imperfect body and suffered from things I couldn’t explain. I started by confronting these experiences, giving them a face, and creating distance to observe them, like in my work on teratomas or yeast infections. Over time, this led me to question social and institutional power structures, especially in medicine, care, and treatment systems. I realized that vulnerability and recovery already exist in memory, and I became more sensitive to ways of recording these memories. Even though the body appears stable, it’s constantly changing and adapting, and the digital or virtual body is not separate from the physical—it exists as a trace or a residue. The body shows how we continuously break, heal, and change, while digital surfaces reveal layers of time and memory.

A new generation profile series, Chamber exhibition view, 2024

Are there particular artists, writers, or thinkers who have influenced your way of approaching the body and technology?

My approach to body and technology comes from artists and researchers who see the body as fluid and permeable rather than fixed. Judy Chicago inspired me with her work visualizing social and historical contexts through women’s experiences and bodies, showing how personal vulnerability can become a visual narrative. Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr in bio-art explored the boundaries between living matter and artificial structures, highlighting uncertain states created by the interaction of bodies and technological intervention. Their work directly influenced how I combine biomaterials and algorithms to reconstruct female bodies. Tauba Auerbach’s experiments with cross-media transitions and hybrid planes laid the technical foundation for how I create new surfaces and textures by combining digital images with physical media, print, and painting. In contemporary digital body practice, Ed Atkins has been a key reference, exploring instability in digital images and bodily experiences, and blending virtual and physical sensations. This approach inspired my work with AI and virtual female bodies, and expressing conditions like yeast infections in hybrid virtual-physical forms. Finally, Gemma Blackshaw, a professor at RCA, provided an academic foundation through her research, particularly the study I care by…, which explores bodies experiencing illness, changing bodies, and bodies receiving care. Her work guided me to explore intermediary surfaces and sensory languages created when digital and physical bodies meet. Ultimately, my practice reinterprets female bodily experiences in a digital-physical hybrid space and challenges traditional hierarchies, combining all these references into a visual and conceptual experiment.

A new generation profile elect, oil pastel on printmaking paper, 152x102cm, 2024.

Let’s talk about The AI Chronotopes: Moons, Castles, Trees! Can you tell us about your piece in the exhibition? What questions are you hoping to raise through it?

For this exhibition, I presented the 28days series, which focuses on yeast infection, a fungal condition affecting the female body. Through virtual conversations with AI, I explored how a virtual AI with a female body might think, feel, and imagine experiencing the condition. I also imagined how the hybrid body—both virtual and physical—experiences yeast infection together. I treated the uterus as an unknown landscape, using algorithmically generated surfaces and biomaterials to represent the condition. As the materials corrode or decay, prints detach or curl, creating sculptures that emerge naturally. In a way, these are hybrid female bodies created by both virtual and physical experiences. Through this, I ask what qualities we would assign or inherit in a hybrid female body, what sensations and thoughts it might have, and ultimately, how we can interpret and define the female body.

28days, digital print with gelatine, 2025

What else fills your time when you’re not creating art?

Outside of my studio practice, I act and explore how the body moves and reacts. Acting allows me to observe how the body responds to space, time, and sensory stimuli, and how these reactions reshape emotion and experience. I don’t see it as just a hobby—most of my income comes from filming—so I approach it as a practice to understand bodily response and adaptation. This exploration may expand into performance or other art forms in the future. I also enjoy cooking at home, which is quite similar to printmaking—layering, waiting, repeating, and paying attention to details.

Tera 1, digital monotype, Diasec 27x35cm, 2023

What is a profound childhood memory?

A vivid childhood memory is falling on a rainy day and getting a deep dent in the center of my forehead. I remember running so freely that day. That spot still feels like my own flat spot or a sort of “terminal time.” Another memory is when I accidentally swallowed a tooth my dad had pulled. He tried everything to get me to spit it out, but it had already gone down, and to this day no one knows where it ended up. I’ve kept these small incidents for years as potential material for my work, and they’ve become starting points for exploring the body, sensation, and memory in my practice.

What is a fun fact about you?

I truly believe in the existence of in-between spaces, or even dimensions between dimensions. As a child, growing up in a Christian household, I naturally imagined invisible worlds and other dimensions. This habit influenced my worldview and values and continues to shape my work, which explores the intermediate space where reality and virtuality, body and digital, disease and healing intersect. In my practice, I try to embody this “in-between” space through material and digital layers, repetition, and interactivity, allowing audiences to encounter new sensations and experiences in the gaps.

Wonder weeks, Tya, Seoul, 2024

Finally, where do you see your exploration of digital and bodily hybridity evolving next?

I want to expand the intersection of digital and physical bodies into more experimental and fluid surface practices. So far, my combination of print, painting, and digital media has transformed female bodily imperfections and experiences of disease into intermediate surfaces. Moving forward, I want these hybrid surfaces to become living, sensory spaces, where audiences encounter texture, color, layers, and traces of time, and interact with the work to generate constantly evolving images and experiences. My goal is to create fluid planes that exist between digital and physical, virtual and real, where imperfection and vulnerability generate new forms of life. In this process, I hope to extend printed thinking as a visual mode of perception and build a hybrid visual language where painting and digital imagery intersect. Ultimately, I aim to map invisible bodily narratives onto new pictorial landscapes, exploring continuous creation and transformation at the intersection of bodily experience and digital form.

Wonder weeks, Tya, Seoul, 2024

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