Can Art Reverse Aging? Lynn Hershman Leeson’s New Show Defies the Limits of Time
Lynn Hershman Leeson Self-Portrait (2025). Photo courtesy of the artist and Altman Siegel, San Francisco.
The artist's new works, now on view at Altman Siegel in San Francisco, reckon with our age-old battle with mortality.
by Jo Lawson-Tancred
This article was first published in Artnet on September 19, 2025, 2024.
The problem with making prescient art is that its relevance may only become apparent in hindsight. Time and again, this has proven the case for Lynn Hershman Leeson’s many experiments in new media since the ’60s. In 1984, she began her confessional “Electronic Diary” series with the musing that “we’ve become a society of screens, of different layers that keep us from knowing the truth.” Who could have guessed that her words would so grimly foreshadow an era when fake news runs rampant across a social media landscape composed mostly of people talking to screens?
Agent Ruby (1998-), the female A.I. chatbot who later evolved into DiNA (2004), taps into the great knowledge bank of the internet to answer any questions she is posed. Both bots were a critical flop when they debuted. Or, as Hersham Leeson put it to me: “No one knew what they were, they didn’t sell, no one wrote about them.” I won’t need to explain why they have recently received a sudden resurgence of interest.
For once, however, Hershman Leeson’s latest show—”About Time” at Altman Siegel in San Francisco—feels right on time. Or is that because, as ever, the artist offers a high-tech twist on an eternal theme? In this case: our battle with mortality.
Lynn Hershman Leeson, Eternally Yours (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist and Altman Siegel, San Francisco.
The Effects of Time
The show, centered around the artist’s injectable anti-aging serum, would have seemed like sci-fi fantasy just a decade ago. Today, it feels like the logical next step for a culture that has already embraced Ozempic for weight loss and facial filler for smoothing away wrinkles. Both quick fixes have been held responsible for the increasing ubiquity of a standardized beauty ideal commonly known as “Instagram face.” The longer term drawbacks of such a Faustian bargain, as recently explored in body horror blockbuster The Substance (2024), remain a matter for speculation.
So, how has Hershman Leeson managed to do the impossible and serve up the elixir of eternal life? Since 2012, the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR has allowed for huge advancements in rewriting the DNA of living cells. So far, it has been banned for use on humans and can only be developed via experiments on lab rats. Working with long-time collaborator, Dr. Tomas Huber, Hershman Leeson has commissioned a private lab in China to create an illicit serum engineered to reverse aging. Her resulting new age sculpture, Eternally Yours (2023), features these syringes of serum stored at 38°F in a custom refrigerator. There are only three editions, and they come with an asking price of $100,000.
Lynn Hershman Leeson, Home Companions (2025). Photo courtesy of the artist and Altman Siegel, San Francisco.
Hershman Leeson’s own complex feelings around this potent serum and the effects of time are explored in the latest video from her ongoing “Electronic Diaries” series, which was commissioned for the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, currently on view through January 11, 2026. “When you’re younger, life gives you things,” she says. “It gives you a voice, it gives you the ability to move, to see, to discern, to have language. As you get older, things are taken away—your friends, then your movement, your vision, your ability to remember.”
“It’s a reverse way of learning how to manage with less,” she concludes but, despite the cruelty of this, she has decided that, ultimately, she would not chose to take the serum. “I realized that all of us live in our time, and that’s what time is about.”
Hershman Leeson’s radically confessional approach to analyzing the possibilities of new scientific developments foregrounds the question of how they might affect our psyches. That technology inevitably becomes tied up in identity, and the dystopic confusion that results, is further explored in “About Time” through a series of new digital prints on aluminum. In several, a monstrous woman’s silhouette is overlaid with neon strands of DNA or medical bottles that have an almost radioactive sheen. In Lynn as DNA (2025), one clinical vial contains a sepia tone portrait of the artist as a young girl, then the image of Shirley Temple-esque innocence.
Lynn Hershman Leeson, Lynn as DNA (2025). Photo courtesy of the artist and Altman Siegel, San Francisco.
Alongside these sinister, futuristic visions are more DIY-style collages, a medium Hershman Leeson has turned to since the early days of her practice. Reminiscent of feminist montages by British artist Linder, these cut up and embellished images pack a comical punch, as in Double Click (2020), when a woman appears transfixed by the blue birds that symbolize Twitter (now X).
“Life is about collage,” Hershman Leeson explained of her decision to return to this medium. “We collage time, energy, experience along with things we buy and co-exist with. Singular disciplines are extremely restrictive and deny the joy of merging unknowns together for a dynamically unknown result.”
Lynn Hershman Leeson, Double ClicK (2020). Photo courtesy of the artist and Altman Siegel, San Francisco.
The Art of Identity
Born in Cleveland in 1941, Hershman Leeson has lived in the Bay Area since the 1960s, when she moved there to pursue her MFA at San Francisco State University. Today, we might literally be able to alter our own DNA, but Hershman Leeson has long had an eye to various other ways in which we might reinvent or fictionalize our identity. These early projects also betray an audacious willingness to merge art and life, at times allowing the two to become nearly indistinguishable.
The most famous example is surely Roberta Breitmore. The performance art piece, which lasted most of the 1970s, saw Hershman Leeson create and, where necessary, become a blonde character who was brought to life as much by her distinctive beauty rituals as her bureaucratic records. As well as having particular mannerisms, Breitmore had her own bank account and even put ads in the local newspaper to rent a room. Her existence, over nearly a decade, raised the question of what qualifiers make anyone real. The conundrum lives on in 2025, with Breitmore inspiring the “Roberta Look Alike Contest” by Altman Siegel and di Rosa SF on October 4.
Lynn Hershman Leeson, Roberta’s Construction Chart #1 (1975). Image courtesy of the artist and Altman Siegel, San Francisco.
Hershman Leeson has described a long struggle to convince institutions to recognize her work as art. After all, it had no obvious precedent. It may be that work as daringly experimental as Hershman Leeson’s could only have been made outside the glare of the mainstream market, but now it is now time for her to receive her due. Today, most discourse—positive or negative—around technology in art centers on A.I., but Lynn Hershman Leeson seems to think that the bigger story is our ability to reprogram our genes. With her track record for prophesy, we should probably sit up and listen before it’s too late.
“Lynn Hershman Leeson: About Time” is on view at Altman Siegel, 1150 25th Street, San Francisco, California, through October 11.
Jo Lawson-Tancred writes about news happening across the art world, including at museums, in archaeology, on the gallery scene, and emerging uses of tech in art. Her book “A.I. and the Art Market” was published by Lund Humphries in 2024 in the U.K. and 2025 in the U.S. An Italian edition is coming soon.