Jae Rhim Lee

Jae Rhim Lee is a scientific artist, designer, and entrepreneur with a practice at the intersection of biology, culture, and commerce. Jae Rhim developed the Infinity Burial Project, an alternative postmortem system to explore how our afterlife choices affect the planet’s health. What started as an artistic provocation is now a company, Coeio, which offers Infinity Burial Suits for humans and Infinity Burial Pods for pets.

Jae Rhim’s goal is to transition our death-denying culture into what she calls “decompi-culture”—a radical acceptance of death, and recognition that our physical presence is intimately connected to the environment. Her Infinity Burial Suit uses mushrooms and other biological organisms to help facilitate body decomposition, remediate toxins in the human body and deliver nutrients to plants. As she describes it, “Cultivating the infinity mushroom is a step towards taking responsibility for my own burden on the planet.”

Born in South Korea and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Jae Rhim’s work has appeared in exhibitions in North America, Asia, Africa, and Europe. She is a Stanford d.school Fellow, TED  Fellow, and CEO of Coeio.

Photo Credit: Bret Hartmann