Eugenie Lee's experimental collaborative project Seeing is Believing conveys a type of chronic pain called Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS). Through a one-on-one interaction between the artist and a participant, the interactive performance installation conveys a metaphorical experience of chronic pain by manipulating each participant’s multisensory experience using the latest technologies. The project is based on neuroscience research showing that pain is integrated with the person’s environment, and can be influenced by many factors including vision, touch, hearing, expectations and previous experiences.

Seeing is Believing is an exercise to demonstrate that the brain can still produce perceptions of pain even in the absence of physical injury. It is also an artistic way of externalising an inherently internal experience, so that the audience can experience something of what it is like to have CRPS. Please note that this artwork is designed not to give pain to you, however it may or may not involve various types of discomfort depending on your response.

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Eugenie Lee is a Sydney-based, Korean-Australian interdisciplinary artist with a conceptual focus on her lived experience with persistent pain. Experimentation and collaboration with pain scientists and researchers, who investigate ways in which technologies can assist in pain research, have become an important conceptual underpinning for her interdisciplinary art practice which includes participatory performances using technologies, installations, sculptures and paintings.
 

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Presented in conjunction with 'The Patient' at UNSW Galleries. 

'The Patient' explores the ways in which artists engage with powerful human experiences in the fields of health, biological science and medicine, contributing to discourse on the representation of illness, disease, care, individual agency and what it is to be human. Artists present new experimental works and ongoing projects across a range of media, connecting to us as viewers (and participants) in ways that are variously difficult, fearless, funny and sometimes unlovely.

Image: Eugenie Lee, Seeing is Believing 2016, Mirage Machine - self-contained and on tabletop, virtual reality in anechoic chamber, chairs and tables. Installation view, 'The Patient' at UNSW Galleries 2016. Photo: Silversalt Photography