Lee Ufan
Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kobe, Japan
Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art is pleased to present a major retrospective by Lee Ufan on the occasion of the museum’s 20th anniversary. This exhibition marks the artist’s first retrospective in Western Japan, and follows a first iteration at The National Art Center, Tokyo in 2022.
Eagerly absorbing a wide range of thought and literature from the East and the West, Lee spearheaded the Japan-based Mono-ha group in the late ’60s and early ’70s by combining natural and artificial materials in a temperate manner in both his visual art and writings. Moreover, Lee evolved a worldview based on the notion that all things are interrelated not only in his visual art but also in his writings.
Lee's works liberate art from the world of images, subjects, and meaning, and raise questions about the relationship between things, and things and people. This proves that the entire world exists synchronically and is mutually related. Oddly enough, the threat of the novel coronavirus has forced us to change our anthropocentric worldview. Lee's highly revelatory thought and practice provides us with insights about how we might escape this unprecedented crisis.
The exhibition assembles Lee's most important works, including everything from his earliest pre-Mono-ha pieces, which considered the problem of vision, the Relatum series, which changed the concept of sculpture, and his highly spiritual paintings, which produce a tranquil rhythm. In addition to showcasing Lee's past works, enabling us to trace the trajectory of his creation practice, the exhibition includes his latest ground-breaking efforts.
The artist personally determined the composition of this exhibition, which comprehensively highlights Lee’s work, development, and distinctive character from the dawn of his career in the 1960s to his most recent works. The exhibition is divided into two main sections, one focusing on sculpture and the other on painting, and is presented in such a way that the viewer can follow each chronologically.
Appearing at the beginning of the exhibition are Landscape I, Landscape II and Landscape III (all 1968), a set of three paintings executed with pink fluorescent paint on canvas, which were included in the exhibition Contemporary Korean Painting at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (1968), and are representative of Lee’s early style. Like the pair of reliefs Fourth Structure A and Fourth Structure B (both 1968), also employing fluorescent paint, these works produce powerful optical illusions that disrupt the viewer’s vision. With their deceptive optical effects, these works embody trends that flourished in Japan in the late 1960s.
Relatum, ongoing since around 1968, is a series of three-dimensional pieces primarily comprising combinations of stone, steel, and glass. These materials are largely left unaltered, and rather than concepts or meanings, Lee’s focus is on relations: between object and place, object and space, object and object, object and image. Since the 1990s, Lee has also become more conscious of the dynamics of objects and environments, and has produced works in the Relatum series in which stone and steel forms are correlated. His more recent works have tended to be increasingly site-specific, as exemplified by Relatum – Dwelling (B) (2017), installed at the La Tourette monastery in France.
After being inspired by Barnett Newman’s solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1971, Lee recalled the calligraphy he had learned in early childhood and became more interested in the expression of time in painting. The From Point and From Line series of paintings, launched in the early 1970s, present color in the process of gradually fading. These systematic series, which convey the passage of time through vestiges of actions, continued for approximately a decade.
In the 1980s Lee’s paintings took on a more chaotic aspect, with dynamic brushwork, as seen in the From Winds and With Winds series. From around the end of the 1980s, the number of brushstrokes progressively dwindled and empty space became increasingly prominent. In the 2000s, Lee radically curtailed his painterly actions, experimenting with reactions between just a few brushstrokes and blank, unpainted space, as in the series Correspondance and Dialogue. In contrast to the temporality of From Point and From Line, the paintings in these series are spatial in nature.
In 2021, Lee held a solo exhibition at the ancient Roman necropolis of Alyscamps, located in Arles, France. The exhibition included Relatum – Infinite Thread (one of the most recent works in Lee’s Relatum series), which consists of a single piece of string hanging down over a large circular sheet of stainless steel polished to look like a mirror. For this exhibition, Lee has installed a new work based on this earlier piece in the spiral staircase that extends from the basement of the museum to the second floor. This display promises to create a deep resonance between the architectural space, designed by Ando Tadao, and Lee’s work.