Exhibition Opening — Yoon Chung Han: Dreaming Babies: Illi

Gray Area (Mission) Event Link Gray Area presents Dreaming Babies: illi (꿈꾸는 아기들: 일리), a solo exhibition of recent speculative simulation works by Korean artist Yoon Chung Han. This immersive, interactive installation transforms Gray Area’s gallery into a futuristic nursery for 23 special hybrid human babies, each with a different chromosomal anomaly. Each baby sleeps and dreams inside of a virtual incubator in space, weaving stories together with the audience through the expression of their own unique identities. ―――――――――― Exhibition Opening Night: Thursday, September 17, 2026 6 – 9 PM ―――――――――― "Dreaming Babies: illi" at Unfold X in Seoul, South Korea, 2025 Exploring new speculative human designs, Dreaming Babies: illi addresses humanity’s desire to create a perfect being through genetic technologies: the commercializing of fertility treatment, the advancements in the science of cloning, the many possibilities and uncertainties of future human birth, and the ethical dilemmas surrounding genetic modification. Each simulated baby’s story, generated from real genetic data, is created in collaboration with artificial intelligence. Visitors interact with the sleeping babies in real time by inputting sound through a microphone, connecting with them via the ChatGPT system. The live-rendered videos of babies floating in space can be viewed on each screen, where audiences can observe how genetic anomalies are reimagined not as physical difficulties, but as representations of more unique and special forms of humanity. More about Dreaming Babies: illi After experiencing egg retrieval and Preimplantation Genetic Testing (PGT), the artist went through the process of selecting embryos through genetic testing—freezing only those that passed as “normal,” while discarding those that did not. But what exactly defines an embryo with “normal” genes, and should embryos with “abnormal” genes be discarded? Even now, countless human embryos that fail PGT during in-vitro fertilization are discarded worldwide, never reaching pregnancy or birth. Does an embryo that fails PGT, then, represent a baby that was never born? Perhaps humanity today, in striving to produce only the most “perfect” babies in order to survive, will become the last generation—waiting so long for perfection that it never gives birth at all. Or perhaps we will be remembered as the last generation that discarded too many babies deemed “imperfect.” And what about the embryos engineered to be perfect, or babies born after passing genetic tests—how will they differ from the humans before them? If a flaw arises in one of the 23 pairs of chromosomes, it produces a baby with a corresponding condition—but can we truly call that a flaw? What if a chromosome that deviates from our defined “normal” range evolves instead into something excessively perfect—what kind of super-powered baby might emerge? The human form of the future may take shapes and appearances different from what we know today. Paradoxically, the pursuit of perfection might yield babies that appear like strange mutants, while those considered “imperfect” may in fact embody the very image of the “perfect” baby we once imagined. This AI-based installation reinterprets the genome not as an object of pathology, but as a site of imagination and mythology. Each chromosome—often associated with genetic disorders or congenital conditions—is reborn as a baby character with a name, an alter ego, and an imagined being, endowed not with deficiency but with a poetic and abstract superpower. By naming and animating what society often silences or conceals, the work challenges the stigma surrounding disability, difference, and genetic variation. Rather than treating disability and genetic difference as deficiencies, it reimagines them as distinct ways of being. Within this new mythology, the boundaries between the “normal” and the “abnormal” begin to dissolve, allowing difference to emerge as a generative force—one that creates new creative…