Lee Ufan

Lee Ufan is a founding member of Mono-ha (School of Things), a loosely defined group of artists who worked in a shared sculptural idiom in Japan roughly between 1969 and ’74. In work from that time, rather than asserting or denying authorship over an object, Lee distributed forms across what he called a “system” of material and physical relations that inherently incorporate the viewer. Alongside the three sculptures emblematic of his Mono-ha period, this exhibition presents eight paintings dating from the 1970s through the early ’90s, which recently entered Dia’s collection and where the artist foregrounded the canvas as a space populated by both presence and absence. His From Point and From Line series (both 1973–84) rigorously and poetically chart infinity through repeated brushstrokes and the cyclical exhaustion of the paint they carry. In his later series, With Winds (1987–91), Lee shifted toward wavering gestures and a compositional balance of form and void, activating the pictorial surface as a visible structure of invisible movement. Merging phenomenology, Structuralism, and Eastern metaphysics, Lee articulates a sustained critique of modernity across paintings and sculptures produced over three decades of his practice.

Lee Ufan is curated by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, curator and co–department head, with Min Sun Jeon, assistant curator.

Since the late 1960s, Lee Ufan has alternately used painting and sculpture as a means to deepen his worldview: Every being exists in relation to others and the surrounding space. In this relational “system,” the artist sees himself as a mediator rather than a creator, presenting how disparate or opposite elements—such as industrial and natural, visible and invisible, artwork and viewer, as well as self and others—are interrelated. Lee realized the paintings and sculptures on view during a formative period in his career, between the late 1960s and early ’90s, which started when he began engaging the body in the act of making and incorporating the surroundings into his works.

Lee’s early painting series From Point and From Line (both 1973–84) demonstrate how the cyclical repetition of systematic acts can reveal the nature of existence. In these works, discipline lies not only in Lee’s physical performance of a painterly procedure but also in his restrained palette, limited to cobalt blue or vermilion red. To begin each work, the artist laid a canvas on the floor and loaded a brush with mineral pigment dissolved in dense animal-skin glue. Then, to make a sequence of marks—either points or lines—Lee paced his breath, maintained a rigid posture, and applied paint to the canvas until the brush was depleted, the paint gradually thinning and eventually dissolving into nothingness. Lee cycled through this procedure until materiality and physical performance became one, endowing the painterly surface with vitality. Such iterative actions, the artist once said, register “traces of life, endlessly similar yet endlessly changing—a system of time.”

From Lee’s perspective, everything in the universe “starts from a point and returns to a point.” In a red From Point (1975), the left-to-right brushstrokes appear as a continuum of fading dots, suggesting a temporal flow perpetually repeated. This sequence of appearance and disappearance is denser in a blue From Point (1980), where the canvas is divided into three and the rhythmic brushstrokes occur more frequently. Another blue painting from the same series and year features slightly longer dabs, its irregular composition signaling a shift in the artist’s breathing and brushwork toward a less controlled expression. In comparison, the From Line series introduces a more directional and irreversible movement of time. To create From Line (1978), a round brush soaked in blue paint was slowly pulled down in a sequence of single strokes. The vertical succession of lines, with their subtle variations, brings gravity into presence. Lee’s investigation of gravity finds an echo in the sculpture Relatum (1974/2019), in which a long wood beam is tenuously suspended by a rope above a steel plate delicately balanced over an arrangement of small stones. The materials in this work are held in an eternal state of tension where imbalance never resolves into stability.

In the mid-1980s, Lee’s brushwork further evolved from controlled to unbridled, as evident in the increasingly wavering gestures of his With Winds paintings (1987–91). For a 1991 work from this series, the artist loaded a wide brush with gray paint and applied it to the four corners of the canvas in a forceful manner. The painted portion coexists with a greater expanse of unpainted surface, the interplay of color and space activating a visible structure of invisible movement in the painting, described by Lee as “something indefinable, an action coming from the exterior.” The doubling of corners to both bring attention to and destabilize spatial boundaries can also be seen in Lee’s earlier sculpture, Relatum (formerly System, 1969). Here, six steel plates of identical size are bent to a 90-degree angle, placed directly on the floor, and configured in direct response to the built environment. Four parts form an open grid, while the remaining two either wrap around or sit parallel to the architectural corners. By creating a spatial field within the architecture that contains it, this work articulates the fluidity of space. As such, the sculpture appears as relational to the world around it—a defining feature of Lee’s work as a whole.

—Matilde Guidelli-Guidi and Min Sun Jeon

Lee Ufan was born in Gyeongsangnam-do, Korea, in 1936, while the country was under Japanese occupation. The artist’s sculptures and paintings are informed by his relational philosophy, bringing materials and gestures into fields of relation that register temporal, spatial, and material conditions. In 1956, Lee moved to Tokyo where he studied philosophy at Nihon University. In 1967, he had his first solo show at Sato Gallery, Tokyo, and, in 1968, his work was included in Contemporary Korean Painting at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. In 1969, Lee staged an ephemeral happening and made contingent structures for the 9th Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, which brought together Japanese artists who were associated with Mono-ha (School of Things). This show signaled a departure from his earlier optical, discrete paintings. Throughout the 1970s, the artist participated in several exhibitions that juxtaposed North American, East Asian, and European artists to highlight their shared concern with material, process, and site. In recent years, acclaim for his work has brought him exhibitions worldwide. In 2010, the Lee Ufan Museum, designed by Tadao Ando, opened in Naoshima, Japan. A dedicated teacher and prolific cultural critic, Lee has published numerous books. Lee lives in Kamakura, Japan, and Paris.