"You are now inside my work."
Jung Kang-ja’s “Formless Exhibition” has no solid shape, yet it creates a suffocating tension that makes viewers step back. White smoke seeps from the corners of a square room. A red siren blares. A flat voice repeats, “You are now inside my work,” pulling visitors into the closed atmosphere of South Korea in the 1970s. The smoke, intangible but insistent, keeps pushing forward, rising to knee level no matter how far one retreats.
Leeum Museum of Art has brought back “Formless Exhibition,” first shown at Jung’s debut solo show at the National Public Information Center in 1970. The government at the time, which viewed avant-garde art as political agitation, forcibly removed the work three days after the opening without consulting the artist. With Jung now deceased, Leeum said it worked to reconstruct the original form based on past news coverage, the artist’s notes and testimony from her family.
Leeum said Tuesday it will present the exhibition “Into Another Space: Immersive Environments by Women Artists 1956-1976” starting May 5.
Originally organized in 2023 at Haus der Kunst in Munich, the show expanded as it traveled through Rome and Hong Kong before arriving at Leeum. It revisits and reconstructs pioneering environment works by women artists long left out of art history. Often seen as early models for today’s “experiential” or “immersive” exhibitions, the works allow visitors to step inside and experience light, sound, color, air and movement with their whole bodies.
At a press briefing, Leeum Deputy Director Kim Seong-won said environment works are often discarded, leaving little physical trace. He said two curators — Marina Pugliese, director of MUDEC in Milan, and Andrea Lissoni, artistic director of Haus der Kunst — restored the lost works one by one after three years of research.
Full-scale reconstructions range from Yamazaki’s “Red” to environment works from about 50 years ago by Judy Chicago, Lygia Clark, Laura Grisi and Lea Lublin.
Pugliese said the team began by reviewing magazine articles from the period, then visited institutions where the works were made to see whether photographs survived. For artists who had died, she said, they searched for interview materials and other records.
She said women artists in the past often struggled to fully realize what they wanted to express because galleries invested little and sales were rare. For living artists, she said, the team focused on realizing ideas that had been conceived but not fully executed at the time; for deceased artists, it focused on detailed reconstruction.
Jung’s “Formless Exhibition” went through a similar process. The museum said it struggled to identify a Korean woman artist who presented environment work between 1956 and 1976, searching across fields including crafts and architecture before finding the piece.
Reconstruction was difficult because documentation was limited and the artist was no longer alive. Leeum said it closely reviewed articles, the artist’s notes and on-site photographs, and met with family members and acquaintances to verify details and approach the original form.
Kim said there were no drawings, exact measurements, descriptions or instructions. He said the line “You are now inside my work” was originally Jung’s own voice, but no tape remained. Based on her voice, he said, the museum used AI to recreate it.
Lissoni said that among the versions presented so far, he was most proud of the one shown at Leeum. He said it clearly reflects the 1956-1976 period the curators set and, using the same criteria, brings forward works they had not been able to examine before.
Kim said the exhibition is notable for highlighting women artists who played a formally important role in the development of modern art history.
"Exhibitions about women artists can easily fall into a trap," Kim said. "Social, cultural and psychological theories can bury the art itself. The two curators pinpointed the essentials in a professional, elegant and refined way. Even children can respond immediately to what contemporary art is. It has professional and art-historical value, and it is also popular. You could say it catches two rabbits at once."
The exhibition runs from May 5 to Nov. 29 at Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul’s Yongsan district.
* This article has been translated by AI.
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