Sculptor, painter, poet, writer and philosopher, Lee Ufan is a renaissance man, who pursued an art form that defies all conventional notions of what art is. Born in Korea in 1936, Lee studied calligraphy, poetry and painting and for much of his life, lived between France and Japan. He first rose to prominence in the late 1960s as one of the leading proponents of the avant-garde art movement known as Mono-ha (“School of Things”) which started in Tokyo, Japan. Mono-ha artists shifted focus from the conventional definition of an artwork as a finished object such as a painting or a sculpture, to objects in their primary form like natural and industrial raw materials. These materials are often put together in combinations that are just as easily dismantled to emphasize their temporality. For his insightful and pathbreaking work, Lee received the UNESCO 2000 Prize, among many other awards.

Here are three works from the Relatum series that Lee has been making since 1968.

By juxtaposing natural rocks with industrial steel, these sculptures emphasize an equal relationship between raw nature, manufactured materials, the viewer, and the surrounding space.

Like his sculptures, paintings by Lee embody his minimalist style that prioritizes empty “negative space” iver intention mark making.

Although he is mainly known for large scale work, Lee has also produced an extensive body of smaller, intimate works throughout his career. These smaller-scale creations maintain the exact same philosophical depth of the Mono-ha movement, relying on a strict economy of gesture to prompt an encounter between materials and space.

Lee’s smaller works also include ceramics such as plates and jars made of white porcelain forms that are minimally painted and glazed. Rather than decorating the whole piece, he allows spare meditative brushstrokes and empty space to have a dialogue with each other that is a hallmark of his minimalist practice. Here are two examples.

Takeaways

What do Mono-ha artists like Lee Ufan hope their viewers to takeaway? Lee Ufan’s aesthetics revolve around the idea of “encounter” by which he means the viewer is brought into a direct, unmediated relationship with raw material, space and time. Like the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi (finding beauty in imperfection and impermanence), Mono-ha artists want the audience to sense the essence of “being” in matter, however raw or unadorned they may be. By presenting works as such, they hope to shift the perception of art as finished object to a quiet dialogue with the materials themselves and the space they occupy. Importantly, Lee rejects the Western idea of abstract art as an expression of the artist’s ego, choosing to nudge the viewer to accept the world “as it is.” It is a humble gesture, one that is consistent with Lee’s core philosophy that art is “everywhere,” never complete, always open-ended, and always accessible to those who seek the meditative experience as opposed to egoistic grandeur.

Coming up next

In Part 2 I will share excerpts of two essays by Lee Ufan that articulate the artist’s approach to making art.