"You are now inside my artwork."
Jung Kang-ja’s “Formless Exhibition” has no solid object, 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 artwork.” The work pulls visitors into the closed atmosphere of South Korea in the 1970s. Like authoritarian control that could not be grasped but was unmistakably present, the smoke keeps pressing in, rising to knee height no matter how far one retreats.
Leeum Museum of Art has revived “Formless Exhibition,” first shown at Jung’s debut solo show at the National Public Information Center in 1970. The government at the time, which treated avant-garde art as political agitation, forcibly removed the work three days after the opening without consulting the artist. With Jung now deceased, the museum reconstructed the piece by drawing on past news reports, the artist’s notes and testimony from her family, Leeum said.
Leeum said Tuesday it will present the work in its exhibition “Into Another Space: Women Artists’ Synesthetic Environments 1956-1976,” opening May 5.
The exhibition was organized in 2023 at Haus der Kunst in Munich and expanded as it traveled via Rome and Hong Kong to Seoul. It revisits and reconstructs pioneering environment works by women artists long omitted from art history. Often described today as “experiential” or “immersive,” the installations invite visitors to enter the works and experience light, sound, color, air and movement with their whole bodies.
At a news conference Tuesday, Leeum Deputy Director Kim Seong-won said environment works are often discarded, leaving little physical trace. He said Marina Pugliese, director of Milan’s MUDEC, and Andrea Lissoni, artistic director of Haus der Kunst, restored the lost works one by one after three years of research.
Full-scale reconstructions include works from about 50 years ago, from Yamazaki’s “Red” to installations by Judy Chicago, Lygia Clark, Laura Grisi and Lea Lublin.
Pugliese said the team began by reviewing magazine coverage from the period, then visited institutions where the works were made to see whether photographs remained. 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 envisioned because galleries invested little and sales were rare. For living artists, she said, the team focused on realizing ideas that were conceived but not properly executed at the time; for deceased artists, it focused on detailed re-creation.
Jung’s “Formless Exhibition” went through a similar process. The museum said it had difficulty identifying a Korean woman artist who presented environment works between 1956 and 1976, searching across fields including crafts and architecture before finding Jung’s piece.
Restoration was also difficult because documentation was limited and the artist had died. 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 artwork” was originally Jung’s own voice, but no tape survived; the museum recreated the voice using AI based on her recorded speech.
Lissoni said that among the exhibition’s versions to date, he was most proud of the one presented at Leeum. He said it clearly shows the period the curators set, 1956 to 1976, and brings forward works they had not been able to examine under the same criteria.
Kim said the exhibition is notable for highlighting women artists who played a formally important role in the development of contemporary art history.
"Exhibitions about women artists can easily fall into a trap," Kim said. "Social and cultural or psychological theories can bury the art itself. The two curators pinpointed the essentials in a professional, elegant and refined way. Even young 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 May 5 through Nov. 29 at Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul’s Yongsan district.
* This article has been translated by AI.
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