How can artists, activists, and scientists come together around problems that draw the line between life and death? This question grounds the practice of an artist and a STS researcher, Chaelim Lim. Working at the intersection of art and science through installation and research-driven projects, she seeks to position questions of life and death at the heart of science—a site of knowledge production where vast social capital is mobilized. Her work traverses multiple sites where knowledge takes on a body, including museums, scientific evidence and archives, oral narratives, and local ritual practices such as gime, a shamanic paper effigy from Jeju, Korea, examining how knowledge is produced and legitimized.

As the Norris Center Art + Science Graduate Fellow, Lim develops her work through long-term engagement with taxidermy collections and natural history exhibition infrastructures, translating archival research into spatial and material installations. In this process, she brings gime—Jeju’s shamanic tool—into dialogue with scientific collections, positioning it as a speculative method and counter-archive that re-materializes, or re-embodies, data. This ongoing inquiry into the relationship between body/material and knowledge/data extends through Body Projects (2019–) and Ghost Body Workshop (2024–). Here, the “body” is not treated as a matter of scientific or artistic object, but as a critical medium through which artists, activists, and scientists can build solidarities around questions of life and death, and as a sensory and relational device that enables broader public engagement and collective participation.

Lim holds an MA in Posthuman Studies from Ewha Womans University and is currently an MFA candidate in Environmental Art & Social Practice at the University of California, Santa Cruz.