In the middle of a densely wooded park, a 3.6-meter-wide cube-shaped room wrapped in red vinyl floats in the air. The work, striking in its contrast of green and red, sits 70 centimeters above the ground, requiring viewers to bend down to enter. Inside, visitors experience full immersion in a red-soaked space; from outside, they can watch the people within as if observing a shadow theater. The interactive piece was first presented by artist Tsuruko Yamazaki in 1956 at the Second Gutai Outdoor Art Exhibition in Ashiya Park, Japan. Twenty years later, when the 1976 Venice Biennale commissioned curator Germano Celant to organize its central exhibition under the theme of "ambiente," the work was spotlighted as the first example of environmental art created by a woman artist.
This historic work has now arrived at the Leeum Museum of Art in Hannam-dong, Yongsan-gu, Seoul. The special exhibition "Into Another Space: Synaesthetic Environments by Women Artists 1956-1976" reilluminates, for the first time, the pioneering "environmental" works of women artists long marginalized in art history. The term "ambiente," first proposed by Lucio Fontana in 1949, refers to an art form in which viewers do not merely look at a work but enter into it, experiencing light, sound, color, air and movement with their entire bodies. Now commonly referred to as "installation art," the genre was pioneered as early as the 1950s through the 1970s by experimental women artists who were never properly recognized in art history. The exhibition reconstructs at full scale the forgotten environmental works of 11 women artists, including Judy Chicago. Originally organized by Munich's Haus der Kunst in 2023, it has traveled to Rome's National Museum of 21st Century Arts and Hong Kong's M+ before reaching Korea.
Jung Kang-ja (1942-2017) is the only Korean artist included. A graduate of Hongik University's Department of Western Painting, Jung presented an entire space as a work in her first solo exhibition in 1970. Upon entering a space draped in black curtains, sirens blared and smoke poured out. Lights illuminated the startled faces of visitors as the artist's voice broadcast, "You are now inside my work." This was "MucheJeon" (Non-Object Exhibition), which the government at the time deemed political agitation through avant-garde art and shut down after just three days. Her bereaved family provided the artist's voice, which was reconstructed using AI and submitted as the first synaesthetic environmental work attempted by a Korean woman artist.
Because environmental art is meant to be experienced with the entire body, the museum says child visitors enjoy it most. Lygia Clark's "The House Is the Body" requires visitors to remove their shoes and pass through a space featuring rubber balls, ropes and mirrors. Its subtitle, "Penetration, Ovulation, Germination, Expulsion," alludes to the process of birth. Colombian artist Lea Lublin's "Penetrating Phallus" and "Penetration/Expulsion" address similar themes of human reproduction. Visitors enjoy passing through tunnel-like works made of transparent vinyl. Ironically, the work was first unveiled at a 1970 underground tunnel completion ceremony, satirizing the tunnel as a symbol of national development and modernization.
Judy Chicago's 1966 work "Feather Room" fills a white-walled room with approximately 136 kilograms of feathers. The work serves as both a critique of the authority that "hard materials" hold in male-dominated architectural history and a critique of the abstract art that dominated the era. While the original used chicken feathers, this exhibition uses "goose feathers collected without animal cruelty." Visitors may scatter the feathers or lie down in them, and an adhesive tool for feather removal is provided at the exit. Other works invite visitors to linger, including Aleksandra Kasuba's "Spectral Passage," which depicts the journey of life from birth to death and rebirth through a rainbow-colored corridor, and "Dream House," which fills an entire environment with light and sound. First presented in 1966, "Dream House" continues as a generational collaborative structure now joined by the original creators' disciples.
Kim Sung-won, deputy director of the Leeum Museum of Art, introduced the exhibition by saying, "This is an exhibition that revives 'environmental' art not as a sealed historical genre but as a living form that moves between past and present." She added, "It is a project that is professional, holds great significance in art history and is also accessible to the public."
