‘Inside Other Spaces’ to reexamine trailblazing women artists across decades

Marta Minujin's "Revuelquese y viva" (1964) is on display at Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, Wednesday. Yonhap

By Lee Hae-rin

• Published Apr 30, 2026 7:00 AM KST
• Updated Apr 30, 2026 3:25 PM KST

Exhibition will show how overlooked female pioneers shaped foundations of contemporary installation art

Between 1956 and 1976, being a woman artist was difficult almost everywhere. The postwar art world left women little room to educate themselves and build careers, pressures that ended up helping fuel the rise of the feminist movement.

An upcoming exhibition at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul will shine a light on these sidelined artists by reconstructing the immersive “environments” in which they once worked and experimented.

Titled “Inside Other Spaces: Environments by Women Artists, 1956-1976,” the exhibition traces two decades in which women around the world built room-scale works that viewers could enter and experience with their bodies.

The project was first presented in 2023 at MUDEC in Milan and later traveled to Haus der Kunst in Munich, MAXXI in Rome and M+ in Hong Kong in their own versions before coming to Seoul.

Curators Andrea Lissoni and Marina Pugliese researched 11 artists, largely from regions and countries that curators said have been underrepresented in canonical Western art histories. Their environments, often made from light, sound, plastic and foam, anticipated installation and media art while challenging conventional, object-based exhibitions.

Despite their innovation, many of these women remained footnotes in mainstream narratives dominated by male artists and market-friendly objects.

Pugliese noted that women “have always had difficulties in being able to express themselves because the galleries were not investing money on them,” explaining that their environments were often built with cheap materials, destroyed after exhibitions and “were not sold anyhow.” Without objects to circulate through galleries and collections, their contributions fell out of view.

The curators also linked their erasure to how art history itself was written.

The period opens in 1956 with what Pugliese called “the first environment that we know of” by a woman artist and closes in 1976, when Germano Celant’s landmark exhibition “Ambiente/Arte” in Venice historicized environments and popularized the broader term “installation.”

To bring these fragile, often lost works back to life, the curators undertook what they described as “forensic” research.

“We did this deep archival research which was based on different media,” Pugliese said, citing magazines from the period, institutional archives, floor plans, photographs and artists’ estates, as well as interviews and texts. For artists who have passed away, the team sought to “respect all the details out of the work and not to interpret in any way.”

The Seoul edition stands out for featuring a new edition of a historic work by Jung Kang-ja, a key figure in Korea’s experimental art scene of the 1960s and 70s.

Her 1967 environment “Muche-jeon (Incorporal Exhibition)” places visitors inside a sparse, smoke-filled chamber where a calm AI recording of the artist says, “You are now inside my work,” recreating the suffocating tension and invisible pressure of 1970s authoritarian Korea.

First unveiled at Jung’s debut solo show at the National Public Information Hall in 1970, the avant-garde work was regarded as political agitation by the authoritarian government of the time and removed just three days after the opening without consulting the artist. With Jung now deceased, the museum has reconstructed the original piece based on contemporary news reports, the artist’s notes and testimony from her surviving family.

From Tsuruko Yamazaki’s “Red” to large-scale reconstruction environments by Judy Chicago, Lygia Clark, Laura Grisi and Lea Lublin, the show brings back to lifeworks from half a century ago at full scale.

Another highlight is “Dream House,” a collaborative environment by Marina Zazeela, La Monte Young and Choi Jung-hee, which is being shown in Asia for the first time and immerses visitors in dazzling light and an endless stream of sound that frames art as a living organism that continuously interacts with its surroundings and those who enter it.

More than a nostalgic restaging of the past, the exhibition argues that the roots of contemporary installation and environmental art run directly through these women’s experiments and their creative breakthroughs.

Lissoni and Pugliese described the Seoul edition as the most accomplished version of the traveling project to date.

“This is the edition of the exhibition we are most proud of,” Lissoni said, citing Leeum’s technical resources and the curatorial dialogue that refined several environments.

Leeum’s deputy director and chief curator Kim Sung-won said this focus on form as well as gender makes the project distinctive, noting that the show “highlights women artists who played a formally important role in the development of contemporary art history.”

She cautioned that exhibitions about women often “fall into a trap,” where “social, cultural and psychological theories” overshadow the artworks themselves, but said the two curators address the subject “professionally, and in an elegant, sophisticated way.” Children, she added, can “instantly respond to what contemporary art is, making the show “both rigorous in art-historical terms and widely accessible — a rare exhibition that truly manages to do both.”

The exhibition will open on May 5 and run through Nov. 29.