The Museum of Modern Art opened Projects 57: Bul Lee, Chie Matsui, a two-person installation exhibition running from January 23 to March 25. The MoMA catalogue framed installation as a major avant-garde practice in Korea and Japan and emphasized how women artists used the medium to challenge institutional and social boundaries. Lee Bul and Chie Matsui brought different East Asian installation vocabularies into MoMA's Projects series, which was designed for experimental and emerging contemporary practices. The exhibition is significant because it placed Korean and Japanese installation art, and specifically the work of women artists, inside a major New York modern-art institution before either artist had the broad international museum profile they later gained.
The exhibition helped position Lee Bul and Chie Matsui within an international contemporary-art discourse on installation, gender, and postwar Asian avant-gardes.