What resurfaces: Decomposition, art and the ethics of Becoming Soil

‘What resurfaces’ examines how Jae Rhim Lee’s Infinity Burial Project (2009–19) reimagines decomposition as a site of ecological, ethical and aesthetic renewal. Under post-industrial conditions, the human body accumulates industrial toxins – synthetic hormones, pesticides, antibiotics and heavy metals – that persist beyond death, contaminating soil and water through conventional burial practices. Lee’s Mushroom Death Suit proposes a decomposable alternative that returns the body to the Soil Food Web as a participant in multispecies metabolism. Drawing on eco-materialist and posthuman frameworks, alongside the artistic practice of Becoming Soil , this article argues that art understood as a metabolic process can transform grief, toxicity and denial into practices of care. What resurfaces thus becomes both a material and cultural question: the body’s return to soil and the re-emergence of suppressed narratives surrounding death and decomposition. Ultimately, the project resituates death within an eco-materialist horizon, revealing decomposition as an ongoing exchange of matter and responsibility across human and more-than-human worlds.