Aileen Yujeong Min is an artist-scholar who studies how digital technologies create affective and phenomenological spaces through the interplay of absence and presence. Drawing on East Asian aesthetic principles such as yeobaek (여백; intentional blank space) and ma (間; generative interval), her work bridges the immaterial and material to examine how digital mediation transforms sensory and emotional experiences of presence, vitality, and connection. In a digitized world, as N. Katherine Hayles observes, digital culture shifts focus from presence and absence to pattern and randomness, dissolving presence into computational flows. Aileen’s research reframes this shift through East Asian aesthetics, revealing how absence and presence evolve within digital environments to sustain cultural resonance and create immersive experiences where qi (氣, vital energy) animates the balance between fleeting and eternal, material and immaterial.

   During her MA studies in Film and Media Studies at Columbia University, Aileen focused on emerging media and digital aesthetics, building on her dual major in Comparative Literature and Digital Arts from Yonsei University in Seoul. Her master’s thesis, Flowing Through the Unseen: Digital Water and Generative Vitality in East Asian Aesthetics, analyzed aquatic motifs in Korean and Japanese digital artworks. Introducing the concept of “digital vitality,” she proposed a framework rooted in yeobaek and ma to examine how East Asian aesthetic principles adapt to AI-driven artistic practices. By investigating how digital systems integrate natural elements like water, her research demonstrated how these works reimagine traditional aesthetics, dissolving boundaries between material and immaterial to create immersive environments that sustain qi and reshape our perception of presence. Reflecting on Han Kang’s The White Book—where fleeting absences reveal enduring forms—Aileen’s work explores how digital technologies transform absence into a generative force of connection and vitality, offering alternative frameworks for understanding computational aesthetics and interactive art.

   As both scholar and practitioner, Aileen contributes to ongoing dialogues on how digital media reshape our understanding of absence and presence, extending traditional East Asian aesthetics into new, affective territories where art, technology, and human experience converge.