Lynn Hershman Leeson saw it coming

American media artist's first museum solo show in Asia traces six decades of experiments with identity and technology that look more prescient by the year

Some art is ahead of its time, until it suddenly isn’t. Once the world catches up, what once felt radical and outlandish can seem obvious to the point of banality. It is a strange sort of vindication that ultimately awaits every visionary, a perverse tribute reality pays to imagination.

The restless oeuvre of Lynn Hershman Leeson might be a case in point. Ever since she came to the Bay Area as a young painter in the early 1960s, the American new media artist has used each new technology to explore how a self is constructed, performed and replicated.

At once cheeky and unsettling, her works track the shifting apparatus of their respective eras, from the wax and tape recorders of the '60s, the laserdiscs of the '80s to genetic engineering and AI of the present day. That full arc is on view in “Lynn Hershman Leeson: First Person Plural,” which opens Wednesday at the Seoul Museum of Art in central Seoul — the artist's first museum solo exhibition in Asia.

That mainstream museums overlooked her for much of her career is hard to fathom in hindsight, given how closely her concerns track the way we live now. Her first solo museum show in New York came only in 2021, days after she turned 80. The notion of a body merged with its machines, once an esoteric preoccupation of feminist theorists like Donna Haraway, has become a fact of life in a world of AI-powered glasses and brain implants. Even her career-long experiments with invented personas have gone mainstream in pop culture, from singers' on-stage alter egos to entertainers playing made-up versions of themselves.

The exhibition takes up the museum's second and third floors, divided into six sections. "Confessions of a Chameleon" opens with Hershman Leeson's early paintings alongside the "Breathing Machines," wax casts of her face that breathe and speak in her recorded voice. “Investigating a Persona” is built around her best-known alter ego, Roberta Breitmore, the fictional woman Hershman Leeson immersed herself in for years, going so far as to get a driver’s license under her name.

In Hershman Leeson's world, technology always wears a woman's face; with each new version, that woman gains a little more control over her own story. The wax faces sealed in their cases, breathing heavily but going nowhere, give way to "CyberRoberta" (1996/2026), a doll with cameras in its eyes that films the visitors gazing at her. By “Logic Paralyzes the Heart” (2022), an on-screen cyborg played by actor Joan Chen finally gets to speak for herself, tracing the history of AI and warfare in a script the artist co-wrote with AI.

The final segment, “Edited Future,” moves to genetic engineering and longevity science. Its centerpiece, the “Infinity Engine” series, likens people chasing longer lives through gene editing to perpetual motion machines, which constantly patch and renew themselves. It is here that the artist steps back, playing more onlooker than provocateur. The mischief of the earlier rooms yields to passive curiosity, even wide-eyed awe, which one might chalk up to the softening that comes with age.

Set against the dizzying, often impenetrable machinery of AI as we know it now, much of the show can read like a relic of a more nascent digital age. The technology has raced so far ahead that a laserdisc belongs in a museum for reasons that have little to do with art. One thing you can say for sure, though, is that the vision behind these works has proved uncannily relevant, and Hershman Leeson deserves all the credit coming her way.

Perhaps that timeliness says as much about technology’s all-consuming reach as it does about the artist’s instinct. Hershman Leeson’s questions still hold up and always will, insofar as each new machine changes what it means to be human, and the changes keep coming faster and faster. If that pace keeps up, where are we headed? And will imaginative interventions like hers be enough to keep up?

"Lynn Hershman Leeson: First Person Plural" is at the Seoul Museum of Art's Seosomun Main Branch through Feb. 21, 2027.