{"id":650330,"date":"2026-05-05T03:20:39","date_gmt":"2026-05-05T03:20:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/650330\/"},"modified":"2026-05-05T03:20:39","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T03:20:39","slug":"inside-other-spaces-to-reexamine-trailblazing-women-artists-across-decades","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/650330\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Inside Other Spaces’ to reexamine trailblazing women artists across decades"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Marta<\/p>\n

Marta Minujin’s “Revuelquese y viva” (1964) is on display at Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, Wednesday. Yonhap<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

An upcoming exhibition at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul will shine a light on these sidelined artists by reconstructing the immersive \u201cenvironments\u201d in which they once worked and experimented.<\/p>\n

Titled \u201cInside Other Spaces: Environments by Women Artists, 1956-1976,\u201d the exhibition traces two decades in which women around the world built room-scale works that viewers could enter and experience with their bodies. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Despite their innovation, many of these women remained footnotes in mainstream narratives dominated by male artists and market-friendly objects. <\/p>\n

Pugliese noted that women \u201chave always had difficulties in being able to express themselves because the galleries were not investing money on them,\u201d explaining that their environments were often built with cheap materials, destroyed after exhibitions and \u201cwere not sold anyhow.\u201d Without objects to circulate through galleries and collections, their contributions fell out of view.<\/p>\n

\"Andrea<\/p>\n

Andrea Lissoni, artistic director of Haus der Kunst, and Marina Pugliese, director of MUDEC in Milan, speak during a press conference at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, Wednesday. The two are co-curators of the international exhibition \u201cInside Other Spaces: Environments by Women Artists, 1956-1976.” Newsis<\/p>\n

The curators also linked their erasure to how art history itself was written.<\/p>\n

The period opens in 1956 with what Pugliese called \u201cthe first environment that we know of\u201d by a woman artist and closes in 1976, when Germano Celant\u2019s landmark exhibition \u201cAmbiente\/Arte\u201d in Venice historicized environments and popularized the broader term \u201cinstallation.\u201d<\/p>\n

To bring these fragile, often lost works back to life, the curators undertook what they described as \u201cforensic\u201d research.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe did this deep archival research which was based on different media,\u201d Pugliese said, citing magazines from the period, institutional archives, floor plans, photographs and artists\u2019 estates, as well as interviews and texts. For artists who have passed away, the team sought to \u201crespect all the details out of the work and not to interpret in any way.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Seoul edition stands out for featuring a new edition of a historic work by Jung Kang-ja, a key figure in Korea\u2019s experimental art scene of the 1960s and 70s.<\/p>\n

\"Jung<\/p>\n

Jung Kang-ja’s “Muche-jeon” (1970) installed at Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul \/ Courtesy of Leeum Museum of Art<\/p>\n

Her 1967 environment \u201cMuche-jeon (Incorporal Exhibition)\u201d places visitors inside a sparse, smoke-filled chamber where a calm AI recording of the artist says, \u201cYou are now inside my work,\u201d recreating the suffocating tension and invisible pressure of 1970s authoritarian Korea.<\/p>\n

First unveiled at Jung\u2019s 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\u2019s notes and testimony from her surviving family.<\/p>\n

From Tsuruko Yamazaki\u2019s \u201cRed\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\"Aleksandra<\/p>\n

Aleksandra Kasuba’s “Spectral Passage” (1975) is in display at Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, Wednesday. Yonhap <\/p>\n

Another highlight is \u201cDream House,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s experiments and their creative breakthroughs.<\/p>\n

Lissoni and Pugliese described the Seoul edition as the most accomplished version of the traveling project to date.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the edition of the exhibition we are most proud of,\u201d Lissoni said, citing Leeum\u2019s technical resources and the curatorial dialogue that refined several environments.<\/p>\n

Leeum\u2019s 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 \u201chighlights women artists who played a formally important role in the development of contemporary art history.\u201d<\/p>\n

She cautioned that exhibitions about women often \u201cfall into a trap,\u201d where \u201csocial, cultural and psychological theories\u201d overshadow the artworks themselves, but said the two curators address the subject \u201cprofessionally, and in an elegant, sophisticated way.\u201d Children, she added, can \u201cinstantly respond to what contemporary art is, making the show \u201cboth rigorous in art-historical terms and widely accessible \u2014 a rare exhibition that truly manages to do both.\u201d<\/p>\n

The exhibition will open on May 5 and run through Nov. 29. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Marta Minujin’s “Revuelquese y viva” (1964) is on display at Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, Wednesday. Yonhap…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":650331,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,460,134],"class_list":["post-650330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=650330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650330\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/650331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=650330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=650330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=650330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}