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《Lynn Hershman Leeson: First Person Plural》
20261021-20270221

The show is running until 2027/02/21 at Seosomun Main Branch

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Seosomun Main Branch
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Weekdays(TUE–THU) 10AM–8PM
Every Friday 10AM–9PM
(Extended Operation Every Friday)
SAT · SUN · Public Holidays Summer, 10AM~7PM
Winter, 10AM~6PM
Opening Hours The last admission is 1 hour prior to closing time
Closed Days 01.01 , Every Monday
Regular closing days

Exhibition Location

Seosomun Main Branch 3rd floor Exhibition Hall
Seosomun Main Branch 3rd floor Crystal Gallery
Seosomun Main Branch 2nd floor Exhibition Hall

Exhibition Period

2026.10.21~2027.02.21

Admission

Free

Information on Docent Tour

Tue-Sun 3PM

Exhibition Genre

Participating Artists

Lynn Hershman Leeson

Inquiries for Exhibition

Soyeon Bang 02-2124-8940

Inquiries for Visit

Information desk 02-2124-8868

Information on the Exhibition

Lynn Hershman Leeson: First Person Plural is a solo exhibition by the American media artist and film director Lynn Hershman Leeson, offering a fresh look at her six-decade career through the lens of "identity." Born in 1941, Hershman Leeson is a media art pioneer who has boldly experimented with technologies such as video, the internet, and AI as artistic media. From 1960s–70s feminist works on "female identity," her exploration has expanded to human-technology interfaces, surveillance and privacy, algorithms, and bioengineering. Addressing how technology and media shape our identity, the exhibition features around 200 works across drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, media installation, video, and film.

The English title, ‘First Person Plural,’ is drawn from the third work in her the Electronic Diaries series. Referring to the grammatical "we," the video juxtaposes the artist's story with that of a Black man, alluding to the self as a fluid entity expanding through relationships. The Korean title, My [Me]s, uses programming brackets to represent multiple selves replicated and reconfigured in technological environments. Structured in six sections, the exhibition maps her career alongside technological progress, illustrating how innate identity expands through social ties and machines, connects via networks, and reaches biological editing through genetic engineering.

While long categorized as a "technology pioneer" or "feminist artist," this exhibition focuses on her long-standing exploration of identity―an aspect often overshadowed by those labels. Lynn Hershman Leeson: First Person Plural invites viewers to see themselves in her story. As her first museum solo exhibition in Asia, this comprehensive survey also serves to re-examine the history of women's media art.

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X-Ray Man, 1970 Lynn Hershman Leeson Collection Hartwig Art Foundation. Promised gift to the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed / Rijkscollectie

Breathing Machine III, 1968 Lynn Hershman Leeson Collection Hartwig Art Foundation. Promised gift to the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed / Rijkscollectie

Roberta's Construction Chart #1, 1975 Lynn Hershman Leeson Roberta Breitmore is a project in which Lynn Hershman Leeson uses a fictional character to observe how a woman creates an identity and relationships in a society. In 1973, inspired by the protagonist of Joyce Carol Oates's short story “Passions and Meditations,” the artist created “Roberta Breitmore.” She meticulously designed Roberta's appearance, speech, and gestures, opened a bank account, obtained a driver's license, and placed a roommate ad to integrate Roberta into real social systems. Initially played by Hershman Leeson, the role was later passed to a hired performer. However, as interacting with real people posed personal threats to Hershman Leeson while disguised as Roberta, the character inversely began to affect the artist's life. Ultimately, she ended the project in 1978 with an exorcism ceremony in Italy, dissolving Roberta into water, fire, air, and earth. This process was recorded as a graphic novel by Zap Comix artist Spain Rodriguez. As the artist's alter ego, Roberta Breitmore foreshadows today's digital surrogates and alternative identities on social media.

Drawing Flow Chart for the Creation of Virtual Critics Prudence Juris, Gay Abandon, and Herbert Goode, 1968 Lynn Hershman Leeson The US art world of the 1970s was male-dominated, making it difficult for female artists to gain exhibition opportunities or receive critical attention. In response to these discriminatory practices, Lynn Hershman Leeson created three fictional critics: Prudence Juris, Herbert Goode, and Gay Abandon. Conceived as an intuitive female critic, a logical male formalist, and an androgynous critic, respectively, they published critiques of female artists in eminent art journals such as Studio International and Artweek. The three critics began their activities in 1968 and retired simultaneously in 1974, when the artist wrote her master’s thesis on them.

Rowlands/Bogart, 1980-1988 Lynn Hershman Leeson Created in the 1980s, Hero Sandwich series explores the ways mass media constructs identity through images. Lynn Hershman Leeson carefully decided on combinations of different figures by considering the real lives and public images of celebrities. For example, the pairing of Marilyn Monroe and Sigmund Freud contrasts the physical body and the mind while connecting the two under the keyword "desire." Other combinations include Gena Rowlands and Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper and Elvis Presley, and Elvis Presley with Patty Hearst. Combining photography and painting, the artist overlayed negative films of famous celebrities and painted over the resulting prints to merge two distinct figures into one. She particularly noted how one gender appeared dominant when combining male and female images, comparing this to the crossbreeding process in genetics where different traits combine and express themselves.

Seduction, 1985 Lynn Hershman Leeson Created through photo-collage in the late 1980s, the Phantom Limb series forms strange body imagery by combining female forms with cameras, televisions, and binoculars. "Phantom limb" is a medical term for feeling pain in an amputated limb, a concept Hershman Leeson expands to mass-media experience: through television, we feel as though we have experienced objects firsthand without direct contact. Its analog production gives Phantom Limb a raw, uncanny quality recalling 1980s？90s MTV aesthetics. Borrowing the objectifying gaze of fashion photography, it exposes how devices created for viewing inversely monitor and control us, questioning where the body's boundaries lie in a technological age.

CybeRoberta, 1996/2026 Lynn Hershman Leeson Tillie, Telerobotic Doll and CybeRoberta explore how the expansion of our perception through technology allows our selfhood to extend beyond the physical boundaries of the body. Utilizing the webcam technology that emerged in the early 1990s, the artist created Tillie, Telerobotic Doll in 1995, followed by CybeRoberta in 1996―a second identically programmed doll inspired by the birth of Dolly the cloned sheep. CybeRoberta represents an evolution of Roberta Breitmore, introduced earlier in Investigating a Persona, and the artist grouped these two dolls together as Dollie Clones. Both dolls are equipped with a video camera in their left eye and a webcam in their right eye, updating captured images to their respective websites every 20 seconds. Visitors can access the website to rotate the dolls' heads and adjust their gaze, experiencing a voyeuristic gaze while adopting the doll as a virtual cyborg that remotely extends their own sight.

Lorna, 1979-1984 Lynn Hershman Leeson Lorna is the pioneering artwork to attempt interactive viewer participation using LaserDisc technology. Lorna, the protagonist, a fictional character suffering from agoraphobia, communicates with the world solely through telephone and television. Viewers use a remote control to direct her actions across 36 selectable sequences, leading to one of three endings: moving to Los Angeles, shooting the TV, or committing suicide. While anticipating today's technologically monitored private lives, the work captures the isolation of modern individuals bound to screens. Accompanying storyboards and flowcharts reveal Lynn Hershman Leeson’s process as a film director designing visual narratives. For this exhibition, Korean subtitles are provided for the first time in the history of Hershman Leeson's interactive media works to enhance viewer accessibility. Due to the non-linear structure of interactive media, the media artist team Seoul Express developed specialized technical methods to synchronize the subtitles seamlessly without disrupting user interaction.

Deep Contact, 1984 Lynn Hershman Leeson Deep Contact is a work that physically connects the viewer's body with the artwork by allowing the viewer to intervene in the narrative development of the piece through a touchscreen. A woman named Marion on the screen tempts the viewer and induces them to touch the screen. Depending on which body part on the screen the viewer touches, intricately intertwined episodes unfold. The work consists of 57 different episodes, through which viewers experience a journey sometimes with Marion, and sometimes with a Zen Buddhist practitioner. In this exhibition, Korean subtitles are additionally provided for Deep Contact. For this purpose, the artist's studio technician and the museum collaborated to select and apply a Korean typeface that harmonizes with the visual aesthetic of early 1980s computer interfaces. This allows Korean viewers to understand the content while maintaining the unique atmosphere of the work.

Synthia Stock Ticker, 2000 Lynn Hershman Leeson

The Electronic Diaries of Lynn Hershman Leeson, 1984-2019 Lynn Hershman Leeson The Electronic Diaries series is a video-format diary that began in 1984 and continues to the present. In this work, Lynn Hershman Leeson speaks about childhood experiences of abuse and violence, physical pain and weight gain, coping mechanisms for these issues, and the process of overcoming these experiences. In the video proceeding in a monologue format, the screen is split or distorted as if reflecting the artist's emotional state, and is transformed in various ways, such as transitioning between black-and-white images. In this process, the artist experiences multiple selves: the "self being filmed," the "self viewing the filmed self," and the "self re-understood" through this. The Electronic Diaries series currently consists of a total of seven parts. Each work was not strictly partitioned and planned from the beginning, but was re-edited multiple times over time to be completed in its current form.

Agent Ruby, 1998-2002 Lynn Hershman Leeson Collection of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Gift of bitforms gallery, Gallery Paule Anglim, and the artist Agent Ruby is a web-based AI chatbot commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and created by Lynn Hershman Leeson between 1998 and 2002. It centers on Ruby, a cyborg clone played by actor Tilda Swinton in the feature film Teknolust. The screen image of Ruby changes expressions throughout the dialogue, occasionally furrowing her brow or pursing her lips. While conversations with Ruby may not be as smooth as modern AI, the work explores the infancy of artificial intelligence and questions human relationships with machines.

Bird in Flight (Still from Conceiving Ada), 1997 Lynn Hershman Leeson Conceiving Ada is Lynn Hershman Leeson’s first feature film, which connects the life of Ada Lovelace―a pioneer of computer programming―with the present through digital technology. Marking her first collaboration with actor Tilda Swinton, the film features Swinton in the role of Ada Lovelace. Originating from the imaginative premise that computer technology allows us to access the memories and experiences of figures from the past, the film explores how time, memory, and human identity can be newly connected through technology. By bridging Ada Lovelace, who lived in the 19th century, with a contemporary female scientist, the narrative examines the possibility of transmitting knowledge and experience across the boundaries of past and present. While highlighting the history of early computer programming and women's scientific achievements, the work simultaneously poses the question of whether digital technology can expand human memory and life.

Three Tilda Bed (Still from Teknolust), 2002 Lynn Hershman Leeson Teknolust is a feature film directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson that explores the questions of human identity and love through biotechnology and cloning. The film revolves around a female scientist and three cyborg clones created using her own DNA, with actor Tilda Swinton playing all four roles. In particular, the character Ruby―the origin of Agent Ruby―appears as one of the clones, illustrating how emotions, desire, and love, long considered private human domains, become intertwined with technology. Notably, the work addressed these themes 11 years prior to the film Her (2013), which depicted a human falling in love with an AI operating system. Today, in an era of rapid advancements in artificial intelligence and biotechnology, Teknolust prompts us to reconsider how the relationship between human beings and technology can expand into the realms of emotion and desire.

Logic Paralyzes the Heart, 2022 Lynn Hershman Leeson

Glo Cat, 2010-2019 Lynn Hershman Leeson

Self Portrait, 2025 Lynn Hershman Leeson

About Time, 2025 Lynn Hershman Leeson

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X-Ray Man, 1970 Collection Hartwig Art Foundation. Promised gift to the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed / Rijkscollectie

Breathing Machine III, 1968 Collection Hartwig Art Foundation. Promised gift to the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed / Rijkscollectie

Roberta's Construction Chart #1, 1975 Roberta Breitmore is a project in which Lynn Hershman Leeson uses a fictional character to observe how a woman creates an identity and relationships in a society. In 1973, inspired by the protagonist of Joyce Carol Oates's short story “Passions and Meditations,” the artist created “Roberta Breitmore.” She meticulously designed Roberta's appearance, speech, and gestures, opened a bank account, obtained a driver's license, and placed a roommate ad to integrate Roberta into real social systems. Initially played by Hershman Leeson, the role was later passed to a hired performer. However, as interacting with real people posed personal threats to Hershman Leeson while disguised as Roberta, the character inversely began to affect the artist's life. Ultimately, she ended the project in 1978 with an exorcism ceremony in Italy, dissolving Roberta into water, fire, air, and earth. This process was recorded as a graphic novel by Zap Comix artist Spain Rodriguez. As the artist's alter ego, Roberta Breitmore foreshadows today's digital surrogates and alternative identities on social media.

Drawing Flow Chart for the Creation of Virtual Critics Prudence Juris, Gay Abandon, and Herbert Goode, 1968 The US art world of the 1970s was male-dominated, making it difficult for female artists to gain exhibition opportunities or receive critical attention. In response to these discriminatory practices, Lynn Hershman Leeson created three fictional critics: Prudence Juris, Herbert Goode, and Gay Abandon. Conceived as an intuitive female critic, a logical male formalist, and an androgynous critic, respectively, they published critiques of female artists in eminent art journals such as Studio International and Artweek. The three critics began their activities in 1968 and retired simultaneously in 1974, when the artist wrote her master’s thesis on them.

Rowlands/Bogart, 1980-1988 Created in the 1980s, Hero Sandwich series explores the ways mass media constructs identity through images. Lynn Hershman Leeson carefully decided on combinations of different figures by considering the real lives and public images of celebrities. For example, the pairing of Marilyn Monroe and Sigmund Freud contrasts the physical body and the mind while connecting the two under the keyword "desire." Other combinations include Gena Rowlands and Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper and Elvis Presley, and Elvis Presley with Patty Hearst. Combining photography and painting, the artist overlayed negative films of famous celebrities and painted over the resulting prints to merge two distinct figures into one. She particularly noted how one gender appeared dominant when combining male and female images, comparing this to the crossbreeding process in genetics where different traits combine and express themselves.

Seduction, 1985 Created through photo-collage in the late 1980s, the Phantom Limb series forms strange body imagery by combining female forms with cameras, televisions, and binoculars. "Phantom limb" is a medical term for feeling pain in an amputated limb, a concept Hershman Leeson expands to mass-media experience: through television, we feel as though we have experienced objects firsthand without direct contact. Its analog production gives Phantom Limb a raw, uncanny quality recalling 1980s？90s MTV aesthetics. Borrowing the objectifying gaze of fashion photography, it exposes how devices created for viewing inversely monitor and control us, questioning where the body's boundaries lie in a technological age.

CybeRoberta, 1996/2026 Tillie, Telerobotic Doll and CybeRoberta explore how the expansion of our perception through technology allows our selfhood to extend beyond the physical boundaries of the body. Utilizing the webcam technology that emerged in the early 1990s, the artist created Tillie, Telerobotic Doll in 1995, followed by CybeRoberta in 1996―a second identically programmed doll inspired by the birth of Dolly the cloned sheep. CybeRoberta represents an evolution of Roberta Breitmore, introduced earlier in Investigating a Persona, and the artist grouped these two dolls together as Dollie Clones. Both dolls are equipped with a video camera in their left eye and a webcam in their right eye, updating captured images to their respective websites every 20 seconds. Visitors can access the website to rotate the dolls' heads and adjust their gaze, experiencing a voyeuristic gaze while adopting the doll as a virtual cyborg that remotely extends their own sight.

Lorna, 1979-1984 Lorna is the pioneering artwork to attempt interactive viewer participation using LaserDisc technology. Lorna, the protagonist, a fictional character suffering from agoraphobia, communicates with the world solely through telephone and television. Viewers use a remote control to direct her actions across 36 selectable sequences, leading to one of three endings: moving to Los Angeles, shooting the TV, or committing suicide. While anticipating today's technologically monitored private lives, the work captures the isolation of modern individuals bound to screens. Accompanying storyboards and flowcharts reveal Lynn Hershman Leeson’s process as a film director designing visual narratives. For this exhibition, Korean subtitles are provided for the first time in the history of Hershman Leeson's interactive media works to enhance viewer accessibility. Due to the non-linear structure of interactive media, the media artist team Seoul Express developed specialized technical methods to synchronize the subtitles seamlessly without disrupting user interaction.

Deep Contact, 1984 Deep Contact is a work that physically connects the viewer's body with the artwork by allowing the viewer to intervene in the narrative development of the piece through a touchscreen. A woman named Marion on the screen tempts the viewer and induces them to touch the screen. Depending on which body part on the screen the viewer touches, intricately intertwined episodes unfold. The work consists of 57 different episodes, through which viewers experience a journey sometimes with Marion, and sometimes with a Zen Buddhist practitioner. In this exhibition, Korean subtitles are additionally provided for Deep Contact. For this purpose, the artist's studio technician and the museum collaborated to select and apply a Korean typeface that harmonizes with the visual aesthetic of early 1980s computer interfaces. This allows Korean viewers to understand the content while maintaining the unique atmosphere of the work.

Synthia Stock Ticker, 2000

The Electronic Diaries of Lynn Hershman Leeson, 1984-2019 The Electronic Diaries series is a video-format diary that began in 1984 and continues to the present. In this work, Lynn Hershman Leeson speaks about childhood experiences of abuse and violence, physical pain and weight gain, coping mechanisms for these issues, and the process of overcoming these experiences. In the video proceeding in a monologue format, the screen is split or distorted as if reflecting the artist's emotional state, and is transformed in various ways, such as transitioning between black-and-white images. In this process, the artist experiences multiple selves: the "self being filmed," the "self viewing the filmed self," and the "self re-understood" through this. The Electronic Diaries series currently consists of a total of seven parts. Each work was not strictly partitioned and planned from the beginning, but was re-edited multiple times over time to be completed in its current form.

Agent Ruby, 1998-2002 Collection of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Gift of bitforms gallery, Gallery Paule Anglim, and the artist Agent Ruby is a web-based AI chatbot commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and created by Lynn Hershman Leeson between 1998 and 2002. It centers on Ruby, a cyborg clone played by actor Tilda Swinton in the feature film Teknolust. The screen image of Ruby changes expressions throughout the dialogue, occasionally furrowing her brow or pursing her lips. While conversations with Ruby may not be as smooth as modern AI, the work explores the infancy of artificial intelligence and questions human relationships with machines.

Bird in Flight (Still from Conceiving Ada), 1997 Conceiving Ada is Lynn Hershman Leeson’s first feature film, which connects the life of Ada Lovelace―a pioneer of computer programming―with the present through digital technology. Marking her first collaboration with actor Tilda Swinton, the film features Swinton in the role of Ada Lovelace. Originating from the imaginative premise that computer technology allows us to access the memories and experiences of figures from the past, the film explores how time, memory, and human identity can be newly connected through technology. By bridging Ada Lovelace, who lived in the 19th century, with a contemporary female scientist, the narrative examines the possibility of transmitting knowledge and experience across the boundaries of past and present. While highlighting the history of early computer programming and women's scientific achievements, the work simultaneously poses the question of whether digital technology can expand human memory and life.

Three Tilda Bed (Still from Teknolust), 2002 Teknolust is a feature film directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson that explores the questions of human identity and love through biotechnology and cloning. The film revolves around a female scientist and three cyborg clones created using her own DNA, with actor Tilda Swinton playing all four roles. In particular, the character Ruby―the origin of Agent Ruby―appears as one of the clones, illustrating how emotions, desire, and love, long considered private human domains, become intertwined with technology. Notably, the work addressed these themes 11 years prior to the film Her (2013), which depicted a human falling in love with an AI operating system. Today, in an era of rapid advancements in artificial intelligence and biotechnology, Teknolust prompts us to reconsider how the relationship between human beings and technology can expand into the realms of emotion and desire.

Logic Paralyzes the Heart, 2022

Glo Cat, 2010-2019

Self Portrait, 2025

About Time, 2025

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Every Friday 10AM–9PM
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The Seoul Museum of Art main branch is a space within which all may meet and experience the joys of art. Located at the heart of Jeong-dong, a district bursting with traces of Seoul’s modern and contemporary history, the museum integrates the facade of the former supreme court building with modern architecture. In addition to diverse programs-spanning exhibitions, educational outreach initiatives, research, screenings, workshops, and performances-the museum features exhibition galleries; SeMA L, an educational space open to all that also serves as a place for relaxation; shared public spaces; a cafe; an art bookstore; and an outdoor sculpture park, creating multiple pathways to diverse artistic experiences.

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