The pages of a tightly filled notebook are turned for the camera, one by one. On the cover are the words “Clean Notes”. This is the work diary of Hwang Yu Mi, a 22-year-old who worked in a South Korean factory manufacturing electronic components until she fell ill, finally dying of acute leukaemia in 2007.

In Eunhee Lee’s fascinating, disturbing, documentary film Colorless, Odorless (2024), we see work records, archival material and testimony from the individuals, mostly Asian woman and migrant workers, who make components for the global electronics market.

The film has its European premier in a new solo exhibition at Room Room, along with Machines Don’t Die (2022) – a video work about electronic waste and the industry that recycles the rare minerals and metals the machines contain.

THE BYPRODUCT OF TECHNOLOGY
Mobile phones, computers, TVs, cars, and countless other products depend on microchips made from silicon – a metalloid semiconductor extracted from the earth as sand and quartz before being intensely refined.

Chips are mass-produced, largely in Asia, in sterile “clean rooms” where employees fabricate integrated circuits from thin silicon “wafers” to make tiny components that can record, store, process and respond to data.

But these wafers require complex processes – photolithography, oxidation, etching – that, despite the clean working environment, often expose workers to harmful chemical fumes and ionising radiation.

In Eunhee Lee’s film, the unbearable slowly becomes visible. On the one hand, semiconductors are one of the world’s most essential innovations. On the other, they silently destroy the lives of already vulnerable people.

Eunhee Lee (b. 1990) works with film and video to explore the relationship between the individual, the image, and technology. In her increasingly documentary works, she lays bare the world’s absurdities to make clear that technology is never only a product of science, advancing humanity: it is a complex and disturbing mix of geopolitics, economic interests, environmental consequences, oppression and exploitation.

TRANSFERRED CHEMISTRY
Her camera traces the invisible: the secure “clean rooms”, the sour-sweet smells of chemicals and the fumes that accumulate unnoticed in working bodies, eventually leading to cancer, early death and the birth of disabled children.

In Colorless, Odorless, Eunhee Lee also attempts to map the terrain of solidarity across countries. We see the efforts of victims, relatives, activists, and unions in Korea and Taiwan to sue multinational electronics companies and raise awareness about the industry’s lack of safety.

Companies move production facilities to developing countries to lower the costs of both labour and safety standards and to avoid regulatory measures. But the costs to the individual remain, simply transferred elsewhere; the disaster is repeated anew in other places, other bodies.

As it is said about 22-year-old Hwang Yu Mi in Colorless, Odorless: “The cleanroom and dust-free garments only protected the semiconductors – not her”.

Colorless, Odorless opens at Room Room on 22 August at 5 p.m. All are welcome!

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INFO

Eunhee Lee: Colorless, Odorless
22 Aug – 2 Oct 2025

Opening on 22 August at 5.00 p.m. Everyone is welcome!

28 August at 5.00-7.00 p.m.
Talk with Eunhee Lee and Mads Mikkelsen, Head of programme at CPH:DOX

Colorless, Odorless is produced by the Han Nefkens Foundation in collaboration with LOOP Barcelona; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Art hub Copenhagen, MoCA Museum, Taipei; ILHAM, Kuala Lumpur and Inside Out Art Museum, Beijing. The exhibition is generously supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.

Room Room
Thoravej 29
2400 Copenhagen NV

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ABOUT THE ARTIST
Eunhee Lee (born in 1990, South Korea) creates experimental and documentary videos/films which explore the relation between individual, image and technology in a social context. Technology is not only a product of science, but a complex compound of different political and economical interests. The practice of observing these phenomena is an ongoing attempt to understand the strange and absurd world we live in.

Eunhee Lee received Absolvent and Meisterschüler in Fine Art at Universität der Künste Berlin, and acquired MFA at Korea National University of Arts.

Based in Seoul, Lee held solo exhibitions at Doosan Gallery (2023), The Reference (2021), CR Collective (2020), participated group exhibitions at Seoul Museum of Art (2022), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2022/2021), ARKO Art Center (2020), Museum of Contemporary Art Busan (2019) and many others.

Her films have been screened at the Jeonju International Film Festival (2025), DMZ Documentary Film Festival (2022), EXiS Film Festival (2018/2019), The Seoul International NewMedia Festival (2023/2018).

MORE INFO
Eunhee Lee received the 2023 Han Nefkens Foundation Loop Barcelona Video Art Production Grant, and it is on the basis of this support that Colorless, Odorless – both as a video work and exhibition in Room Room – came into being.

The Han Nefkens Foundation is a private, non-profit organization that exclusively provides support for the production of video art. The foundation develops its activities in collaboration with an international network of art professionals, who contribute their knowledge and experience as advisors and jury members when selecting the artists who will benefit from the foundation’s support.

Art Hub Copenhagens sat on the jury in 2023 and helped to appoint Eunhee Lee as the winner of the LOOP Barcelona Video Art Production Grant together with representatives from the Han Nefkens Foundation, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, MoCA Museum, Taipei, ILHAM, Kuala Lumpur and Inside Out Art Museum, Beijing.

Established in 2018 in collaboration with the Fundació Joan Miró, the award aims to support and promote artistic production in the field of video art and is specifically aimed at artists from Asia. The award is worth $15,000 to support the production of a new video work, in this case Colorless, Odorless, to be presented at each partner institution, starting with Art Hub Copenhagen/Room Room.

Read more about the Han Nefkens Foundation here.