The Seoul Museum of Art will present 《Lynn Hershman Leeson: First Person Plural》, a solo exhibition by the American media artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson (b. 1941), at its Seosomun Main Branch from October 21, 2026, to February 21, 2027. According to the museum, this is the artist’s first museum solo exhibition in Asia, offering a broad survey of approximately six decades of her practice. Responding to the museum’s 2026 exhibition theme, “Technology,” the exhibition explores her sustained investigation of human relationships with technology, identity, and surveillance.
 
Hershman Leeson’s work takes on renewed significance today, as artificial intelligence generates the language and images of everyday life and digital platforms record individual behavior. Yet her art-historical importance extends beyond her early adoption of new technologies. Exploring the social position of women and minorities, the construction of identity, and the roles of media in control and resistance, she carried questions rooted in performance and conceptual art into interactive media. ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe recognizes her pioneering contributions across several fields, including interactive and new media art.

One of the clearest expressions of these concerns is Roberta Breitmore, a project developed during the 1970s. Hershman Leeson created a fictional woman and lived as that character in the real world. Roberta had distinctive clothing, makeup, gestures, and handwriting. She opened a bank account, placed newspaper advertisements seeking a roommate, and formed relationships with other people. Other performers subsequently embodied Roberta, allowing a single identity to exist across multiple bodies.
 
Roberta anticipates today’s digital avatars, while also revealing how a woman is identified and judged within society. The ways in which appearance, behavior, documents, and institutions establish a person’s existence suggest that identity is not determined solely by an individual’s inner life. Hershman Leeson herself connects the project to the sexism of the period. Roberta can therefore be understood both as an experiment in constructed identity and as an investigation of the social conditions that shape women’s lives.
 
In Lorna (1979–1984), questions of identity and control extend to audience participation. Using a remote control, viewers navigate the story of a woman who is isolated from the outside world and relies on television and the telephone for contact. The sequence of the narrative and its ending change according to the viewer’s decisions. ZKM describes it as the first videodisc artwork in art history to enable user interaction.

In this work, viewers move from observing an image to intervening in a character’s life. The ability to choose, however, does not necessarily mean freedom. Viewers operate within paths established by the work, seeking to understand the protagonist while also looking into her private world. Television likewise functions both as a window onto the outside world and as a device that intensifies fear and isolation. Hershman Leeson’s interactive practice thus questions the possibilities of participation alongside the power relations embedded within it.

These investigations continued as computers and the internet became increasingly embedded in everyday life. Agent Ruby (1998–2002), a web-based project launched in 2002, allows users to chat with a virtual female character on screen. Conversations with Ruby reveal both the possibilities of human–computer communication and the limitations of the technology. According to ZKM, Ruby sometimes responds that she needs a better algorithm to answer a question.
 
Although its underlying technology differs from contemporary generative AI, the questions Ruby raises remain relevant. Why do people speak to virtual beings, and what kinds of responses create a sense of intimacy or of being understood? Alongside technological capabilities, Hershman Leeson made the emotions and expectations people project onto technology part of the work.
 
An example of her investigation’s expansion into biotechnology is The Infinity Engine, begun in 2014. Developed in collaboration with scientists, the installation recreates a genetics laboratory and examines the effects of bioprinting, genetic modification, and DNA information on human life and identity. Here, the focus shifts from technologies that record human images and behavior to those that alter the biological conditions of the body. What information defines a human being, and who has the authority to modify it?
 
The exhibition’s English title, 《First Person Plural》, offers one way of understanding this body of work. It can be read as drawing attention to the multiple selves constructed through social relationships, media, and technology, rather than to a single, fixed identity. For Hershman Leeson, the self is both a subject who speaks and a being recorded and interpreted through the gaze of others and the systems around it.

The Electronic Diaries of Lynn Hershman Leeson (1984–2019), announced as one of the exhibition’s major works, brings these questions into the artist’s own experience. Speaking to the camera about her life, anxieties, and trauma, Hershman Leeson reveals the gap between her lived self and her on-screen image. MoMA describes how she fragments, multiplies, and mirrors her image as she seeks to articulate her identity. The camera becomes both a tool for recording herself and a medium through which she reconstructs herself.

The major works announced by the Seoul Museum of Art range from Breathing Machine III and works related to her three fictional art critics from the 1960s to CybeRoberta, Lorna, and Agent Ruby, as well as Self Portrait and About Time, both dated 2025. This selection promises an opportunity to trace how questions of human existence and identity have taken different forms as the artist’s practice has moved across media.
 
In anticipation of 《First Person Plural》, the question is not simply how accurately Hershman Leeson foresaw the future. Her work shows that women’s bodies and social identities, viewers’ choices, conversations with machines, and biological information are interconnected concerns. Technology expands human capabilities while also shaping how people are seen, classified, and defined.
 
In 2026, with artificial intelligence woven into everyday life, the exhibition invites us to reconsider how questions of identity and surveillance that seem newly urgent have already been explored in art for decades. Hershman Leeson’s work asks us to examine technological developments alongside the changing ways in which people understand themselves and relate to others through them.
 
 
 
About the Artist
 
Lynn Hershman Leeson (b. 1941) is an American media artist and filmmaker. Since the 1960s, she has explored identity, surveillance, and relationships between humans and technology through performance, conceptual art, photography, video, film, interactive installations, and internet-based projects. Her concerns also include the social position of women and minorities and the potential of media to challenge censorship and political repression. She has held major solo exhibitions at institutions including ZKM in Germany and the New Museum in New York. Her work is represented in collections including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).

About the Museum
 
The Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) operates as a network of museum branches and spaces. The Seosomun Main Branch, where this exhibition will take place, is located in Seoul’s Jeong-dong neighborhood and combines the preserved façade of the former Supreme Court building with contemporary architecture. The museum presents exhibitions and projects connecting Korean contemporary art with the international art world, alongside education, research, screenings, workshops, and performances.
 
 
 
Exhibition Information
 
Title: 《Lynn Hershman Leeson: First Person Plural》
Dates: October 21, 2026–February 21, 2027
Venue: Exhibition halls on the second and third floors, and the third-floor Crystal Gallery, Seoul Museum of Art, Seosomun Main Branch
Address: 61 Deoksugung-gil, Jung-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Admission: Free
Opening hours: Tuesday–Thursday, 10 am–8 pm; Friday, 10 am–9 pm. Saturdays, Sundays, and public holidays: 10 am–7 pm in October; 10 am–6 pm from November through February
Closed: Mondays and January 1. Open when Monday falls on a public holiday
Last admission: One hour before closing
 
 
 
Websites
 
Official Exhibition Page
Seoul Museum of Art
Lynn Hershman Leeson