In 1970, an exhibition was forcibly dismantled at the Seoul National Public Information Center. State authorities, who regarded avant-garde art as political agitation, shut the room down. What remained were a handful of newspaper clippings, the artist's notes, and fragments of memory.
 
This is the story of Muchejeon (Incorporeal Exhibition), the first environmental work attempted by Korean woman artist Jung Kangja. Leeum Museum of Art has rebuilt that vanished room, fifty-six years later.
 
The exhibition《Inside Other Spaces: Environments by Women Artists 1956–1976》, now open at Leeum, is a project dedicated to restoring lost works and forgotten names. Yet to describe it simply as "an exhibition introducing overlooked women artists" falls short. More precisely, it is an exhibition that asks us to reconsider an entire art form — one that was always at risk of disappearing.
 
 
 
'Environment' as Art, and the History of Its Disappearance
 
‘Environmental art’(ambiente) is an experiential practice in which viewers enter the work itself and encounter it with their whole bodies. Because each piece is installed specifically for a given exhibition, it does not accumulate as a physical object — once the show ends, the work is dismantled and ceases to exist. An art form that cannot be hung on a wall, placed on a pedestal, or sold, it existed entirely outside the grammar of institutional art.

Andrea Lissoni, Artistic Director of Haus der Kunst, and Marina Pugliese, Director of Milan's MUDEC, who first conceived the exhibition, described the history of environmental art as "a history of destruction and disappearance." Because the works of that era were experimental in nature and resistant to preservation, women artists suffered a double erasure — written out of both art history and the history of environmental art alike.
 
Paradoxically, the very conditions that kept these women at the margins of institutional art became a space of liberation, allowing them to experiment freely. Yet in a male-dominated art history written around painting and sculpture, their work was quickly forgotten.
 
 
 
Four Years of Forensic Reconstruction: From Munich to Seoul
 
This exhibition was originally conceived at Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2023, and has since traveled and expanded through Rome's MAXXI (Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo) and Hong Kong's M+. Transformed and enriched at each stop, the exhibition reaches its most fully realized form here at Leeum in Seoul.
 
To resurrect this lost history, Leeum spent more than four years in a process of "forensic reconstruction," tracking down correspondence, architectural drawings, and critical writings from around the world. Director Lissoni described the process as "closer to an investigation than an act of creation."
 
For living artists, the team worked through direct dialogue; for those who had passed, they pieced together evidence through families and archival materials. This was not restoration in the sense of faithfully returning something to its original state — it was a restoration that had to reckon with the fact that full recovery is impossible.
 
The exhibition spans roughly twenty years, from Tsuruko Yamazaki's Red, shown at Japan's Gutai art exhibition in 1956, to the "Ambiente/Arte" section of the 37th Venice Biennale in 1976. Works by eleven women artists — Judy Chicago, Lygia Clark, Laura Grisi, Aleksandra Kasuba, Jung Kangja, Lea Lublin, Marta Minujín, Tania Mouraud, Nanda Vigo, Tsuruko Yamazaki, and Marian Zazeela — have been reconstructed at full scale.
 
 
 
Spaces That Speak to the Body First
 
The first work to arrest attention upon entering the exhibition is Aleksandra Kasuba's Spectral Passage. Inside a sinuously curved structure that seems to blend multiple geometric forms, layers of colored light spread through the space. Visitors who step inside encounter the shifting interplay of light and structure firsthand, experiencing it intuitively through movement.

Judy Chicago's Feather Room fills a curved white interior with tens of kilograms of goose down. Moving through a space where feathers reach up to one's knees, visitors are immersed in an otherworldly sensation — as if walking on clouds. Conceived as a response to the male-dominated Minimalism of hard metals and rigid structures, the work subverts the very sensation of space through soft, warm materials.

Tsuruko Yamazaki's Red is a crimson structure that visitors must lower their bodies to enter through a gap seventy centimeters above the floor. Marta Minujín's Revuélquese y Viva (Wallow and Live!) is a playful and provocative space constructed from mattresses, while Laura Grisi's South-East Wind literally pushes visitors back with real wind.
 
Lea Lublin's Teranotas uses colored transparent vinyl to give form to the vaginal passage — an intimate space of the female body — inviting visitors to traverse it themselves. Particularly striking is the small child's T-shirt placed inside the vinyl structure, evoking the wonder of life beyond the histories of erasure and forced removal.

The Exhibition's Crowning Achievements: Muchejeon (Incorporeal Exhibition) and Dream House
 
The undisputed highlight of this exhibition is the reconstruction of Muchejeon (Incorporeal Exhibition), by Jung Kangja — a pioneer of Korean experimental art. Forcibly dismantled by the government in 1970, the work returns for the first time in fifty-six years as a result of Leeum's meticulous historical research combined with contemporary technology.
 
With no surviving recordings of the artist's voice, Leeum used AI to reconstruct it from vocal data provided by her family. The artist's voice, resonating through a darkened chamber, transforms avant-garde art made sixty years ago into a living form in the present.

For this exhibition, Leeum is also presenting Dream House — a collaborative environmental work by Marian Zazeela, La Monte Young, and Jung Hee Choi — for the first time in Asia. Combining light, sound, and space, the work draws the time visitors spend within it into the work itself.
 
 
 
Bottega Veneta and Leeum: A Third Partnership
 
The collaboration between Bottega Veneta and Leeum Museum of Art marks the third such partnership, following Kang Seo-kyung's《Willow Drum Oriole》in 2023 and Pierre Huyghe's《Liminal》in 2025. Founded in 1966 in Vicenza, in Italy's Veneto region, Bottega Veneta has maintained a close relationship with artistic practice across architecture, design, dance, music, and the visual arts since its earliest days.
 
A representative of Bottega Veneta stated that the brand "supports work that embodies a pursuit of excellence, communal values, and an original and progressive approach to craft," and that by "backing projects where dialogue across disciplines and geographies is at the center, we contribute to shaping a broader artistic landscape."
 
In an era when cultural sponsorship by fashion houses is often read as an extension of brand image, this partnership reaches beyond simple sponsorship. Bottega Veneta's core identity — rooted in craft and artisanal skill — is genuinely aligned with the spirit of this exhibition: restoring the handcraft-based environmental art of forgotten women artists to its rightful place.
 
 
 
The Moment a Museum Becomes a Living Place
 
Kim Seong-won, Deputy Director of Leeum Museum of Art, described the exhibition as one that treats environmental art "not as a sealed-off historical genre, but as a living form that moves between past and present," calling it "a project that is both academically rigorous and art-historically significant, while remaining accessible to a broad public."
 
The question this exhibition ultimately poses is a single one: what does a museum choose to preserve, and what does it choose to restore? Works that could not be sold, that disappeared when their exhibitions ended, and that left behind barely any records — if those works were erased more quickly because they belonged to women artists, then what is happening here is not simply a historical act. It is a declaration of what today's museum considers worthy.
 
The lost rooms have returned. Across fifty-six years of time, these spaces have reopened — and it is well worth stepping inside.
 
 
 
Exhibition Information
 
- Title: Inside Other Spaces: Environments by Women Artists 1956–1976
- Venue: Leeum Museum of Art, Children's Education and Culture Center, 60-16 Itaewon-ro 55-gil, Yongsan-gu, Seoul
- Dates: May 5 – November 29, 2026
- Supported by: Bottega Veneta, KB Financial Group
- Homepage: https://www.leeumhoam.org/leeum