李禹煥

Lee Ufan was born in 1936 in Haman County, South Gyeongsang Province, Korea (present-day South Korea). As a child he was taught poetry, calligraphy, and painting by literati painters who frequented the Lee household, and he learned how to handle a brush, practicing making dots and drawing lines again and again. This early experience with repetitively deploying minimal elements laid the foundations for the subsequent development of his practice. In 1950 he left Haman County and enrolled in Gyeongnam Middle School in Busan, and in 1953 he entered Seoul National University High School. Lee aspired to become a poet or novelist, but went on to study at Seoul National University College of Fine Arts in 1956. That summer, he visited Japan to see his ill uncle in Yokohama and ended up staying in the country. In 1957 he enrolled at Takushoku University and studied Japanese, and in 1958 he transferred to Nihon University, College of Humanities and Sciences, Department of Philosophy. In 1962, he joined the Nihongafu Art Institute, a Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) group, in order to obtain a visa. In 1966 he went to work at the Korean Scholarship Foundation in Shinjuku, Tokyo, and was also involved in management of the affiliated Gallery Shinjuku. Through this gallery he became interested in contemporary art, including a new style focused on production of optical illusions, and around this time he became acquainted with the critic Ishiko Junzō. In May 1968 he submitted a work for the 3rd Preliminary Show of the Japan Art Festival which consisted of glass superimposed on segmented iron plates with stones placed on top, but it was not accepted due to his nationality. In July 1968, he showed a set of paintings titled “Landscape I, II, III” (reproductions of which are entrusted to The Museum of Modern Art, Gunma), each of which was coated with a shade of monochromatic fluorescent paint, at the exhibition “Contemporary Korean Painting” (National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo). In October of the same year, on the recommendation of Ishiko, he submitted his essay “Jibutsu kara Sonzai e” (From Object to Being) in response to a call for art criticism texts from the publisher Bijutsu Shuppan-sha, and won an award in March 1969. Around the same time, Sekine Nobuo unveiled “Phase–Mother Earth” at the contemporary sculpture exhibition of the Biennale of Kobe at the Suma Detached Palace Garden, Kobe, (October 1968). He created a massive cylindrical hole in the earth and placed the excavated soil next to it in the same cylindrical shape. Many contemporaries interpreted this work as related to “Tricks and Vision: Stolen Eyes”, an exhibition co-organized by Ishiko Junzō and Nakahara Yūsuke and held at Tokyo Gallery and Muramatsu Gallery in April and May 1968. By contrast, Lee argued that the work did not relate to “tricky” expression but was merely “a temporary change in the state of things.”(1) Sekine, who had drawn on topological theory to create “Phase—Mother Earth”, became convinced that Lee’s interpretation connected to a more expansive artistic vision, and Sekine invited like-minded fellow artists to meetings in which Lee played a central role and new modes of art were discussed for over a year.(2) These discussions culminated in a roundtable talk published in the February 1970 issue of the art magazine “Bijutsu techo”, titled “‘Mono’ ga Hiraku Atarashii Sekai” (“Mono” [Things] Opens a New World], in which they outlined their ideas. Lee also contributed the essay “Deai o Motomete” (In Search for Encounter] to the same magazine. The art movement that came to be known as Mono-ha (“School of Things”] subsequently developed with Lee Ufan, Koshimizu Susumu, Sekine Nobuo, Suga Kishio, Narita Katsuhiko, and Yoshida Katsurō, all of whom participated in the roundtable, as core members. At the “Trends in Contemporary Japanese Art” exhibition (The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto) in August 1969, Lee showed works including “Phenomena and Perception B” (later retitled “Relatum”), in which he placed a rock on a glass plate and caused cracks in the glass. This was one of his earliest works combining materials with contrasting properties. The same exhibition featured Koshimizu’s work comprised of a huge paper bag containing a boulder and Yoshida’s iron plate placed atop large pieces of lumber, among others. A more concentrated display of such bold works took place in “August 1970: Aspects of New Japanese Art” at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo in August 1970. According to its organizer, Tōno Yoshiaki, the exhibition aimed for straightforward presentation of innovative art by young artists. This was, at the time, the only exhibition featuring nearly all of the participants in the aforementioned roundtable discussion (Sekine Nobuo was absent due to his participation in the 35th Venice Biennale). In this show, Lee presented the installation “Relatum (A Place Within a Certain Situation) I, II, III” (later retitled “Relatum”), which explored relationships between materials making up a work and the place in which they are located. There are records indicating that Lee began titling sculptural works “Relatum” around 1972, making this work a forerunner, in which “the issue is not relationships between things, but their relation to the surrounding space.”(3) In September 1971 Lee represented South Korea in the 7th Biennale de Paris, exhibiting works such as “Situation” (later retitled “Relatum”) featuring stones placed on canvases laid on the floor. After a brief stay in Europe he returned via the US, where he saw Barnett Newman’s solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA). The encounter with Newman’s work solidified Lee’s confidence in his own work’s concepts as he sought to pioneer new directions in painting. At his solo show at Tokyo Gallery in September 1973, he unveiled the new painting series “From Point” and “From Line”. Produced by dipping a brush in pigment and repeatedly making dots or drawing lines until the pigment ran out, then repeating the process, these paintings manifested Lee’s artistic philosophy which stood in stark contrast to modernist art based on extraction of imagery from the external world. In May 1974, his series of dot and line paintings garnered attention at “Japan: Tradition und Gegenwart” at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in Germany, and Lee was subsequently invited to take part in many group shows in Europe. After focusing on painting for some time, in August 1978 Lee held a major sculpture exhibition presenting 14 “Relatum” works at Galerie m in Bochum, Germany to much acclaim. In conjunction with changes in his environment, the 1980s saw Lee’s painting take new directions, with diagonals added to what had previously been only linear vertical and horizontal structures. Brushstrokes that appeared irregular and beyond the artist’s control came to dominate the canvases, and the series of paintings initially exhibited as “Untitled” and later retitled “From Wind” (1982–1990) and “With Wind” (1987–1991) became central to Lee’s output of the 1980s. A major solo exhibition organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu was held in January 1988, and in April of the same year, the first major Mono-ha exhibition outside of Japan took place at the University of Rome-affiliated Institute of Contemporary Art. Opening dates and locations of subsequent major solo exhibitions include: May 1991, Hara Museum ARC (now Hara Museum of Contemporary Art ARC); April 1993, The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura; September 1994, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, South Korea; November 1997, Jeu de Paume (Paris); June 2001, Kunstmuseum Bonn (Germany); October 2003, Hoam Museum of Art and Rodin Gallery (Seoul, South Korea); September 2005, Yokohama Museum of Art; April 2008, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (Brussels); June 2011, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York); June 2014, Palace of Versailles (France); February 2019, Centre Pompidou-Metz (France); September 2019, Hirshhorn Museum (Washington DC); and August 2022, The National Art Center, Tokyo. Major Mono-ha exhibitions include: June 1987, “Mono-ha and Post Mono-ha”, Seibu Museum of Art (Tokyo); February 1995, “Matter and Perception 1970: Mono-ha and the Search for Fundamentals”, touring The Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, and Musée d’art moderne et contemporain Saint-Étienne metropole (France); May 2001, “Mono-ha”, Kettle’s Yard at the University of Cambridge; October 2005, “Mono-ha Reconsidering”, The National Museum of Art, Osaka; and February 2012, “Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha”, Blum & Poe (Los Angeles). These Mono-ha showcases offered opportunities to re-exhibit Lee’s sculptural works from around 1970, such as the “Relatum” pieces comprised of iron plates and stones. In recent years, several permanent spaces dedicated to Lee Ufan have been established: the Lee Ufan Museum opened in Naoshima, Kagawa in June 2010, Space Lee Ufan at the Busan Museum of Art in April 2015, and Lee Ufan Arles in Arles, France in April 2022. Since he began having large-scale solo exhibitions in the 1990s, Lee has continued to consider the nature of his own paintings and sculptures in new ways. When “With Wind” appeared in solo exhibitions at Tokyo Gallery and Gallery Ueda in November 1989, it consisted of brushstrokes spreading freely across the entire canvas. However, in the work of the same title produced in 1991, blank spaces are left among neatly organized brushstrokes. The same year, Lee began work on a new series titled “Correspondence” which revived the principles of verticality or horizontality that governed his early paintings, and conditions were imposed so that brushstrokes were thick, short, and powerful, resulting in restrained compositions limited to a few areas of the canvas. While the title of the work seems to indicate a shift from natural phenomena such as wind to a more conceptual realm, there is a connection in that both titles are words representing external influences. While the influence of Lee’s sculptures on his paintings was noted earlier, during his 1993 solo show at The Museum of Modern Art, Kanagawa it was observed that blank spaces in the paintings influenced the relationship between the iron plates and stones in the “Relatum” sculptures.(4) In the 2000s, Lee’s painting further evolved and took on additional constraints. In the series “Dialogue” he used large brushes to make a few rectangular strokes, or just one, with gradations of gray within the strokes, and eventually began leaving one of two paired canvases entirely blank. This could be described as a concrete manifestation of nothingness. Even after reaching this apex of sorts, Lee continued exploring uncharted territory. Around 2007, as his painting shifted from “Correspondence” to “Dialogue”, he placed contrasting shades of blue and red on the single canvas, a departure from his monochromatic paintings. The “dialogue” between colors may invite the viewer who perceives this change to engage in dialogue with the work, hinting at a pursuit of oneness characterizing the entirety of Lee’s oeuvre. In an art world that has been heavily biased toward Western cultural values, it can be said that Lee Ufan’s works embody the establishment of an artistic philosophy rooted in an Eastern worldview. (Nakai Yasuyuki / Translated by Christopher Stephens) (Published online: 2024-03-06)