In Part 1, I introduced the art of the international acclaimed artist Lee Ufan who rose to prominence in the 1960s as the co-founder of the minimalist Mono-ha (School of Things) Movement in Japan. Today’s post presents extracts of two essays by Lee Ufan himself, articulating the philosophical basis of his artistic practice. The extracts are from the book, Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity, Guggenheim Museum publication, 2011, and are reproduced here with minor edits.
I On De-objectifying Art
The process of the rise and decline of modern art over the last four or five hundred years is a history of a mode of representation in which images are given a definite form. The idea of an autonomous power of thought, which celebrated the active independence of humans from God was revolutionary. Progressively, artists came to the core idea that the only meaning of “making” was the objectification of an idea – that is, the reification and concretion of an image. The world became an object to be reworked, manipulated by the artist. More fundamentally, the world was seen as material for the execution of ideas, as nothing but a territory to be colonized. Nothing can be seen but images and human faces. The result is that no matter where one goes, one is in a closed world where it is impossible to encounter otherness or new vistas.
Consider a piece of canvas in a frame, entitled Composition, by Mondrian. It hangs on the wall, and when seen straightforwardly as a material object, it is very much a simple physical thing. It does not depict some sort of landscape, nor does it call attention to the canvas, color, thickness of paint, or frame. It is arranged so that the viewer reads the idea of “composition” in it, and it creates an autonomous world unrelated to any landscape in the outside world. Therefore the spectator is not permitted to form associations with the outside world from the painting but must analyze and understand what is in it.
As long as representation is a closed phenomenon without externality, it denies any connection with the outside world and directness of seeing. Even if we see an object (like a row of canned soups) as critical of everyday life, as long as it remains in a representational world cut off from the outside, its status is no different from a Mondrian composition.
When we think of modern life, permeated with the indirect communication of television and computer media and the increasingly hermetic world produced by a systematized mode of image representations, we realize how difficult it is to have a direct relationship with reality. Even mountains and wilderness have been turned into images, and perceptions of the unknown and directness as forbidden. Festivals, dance, theater, and games too, have become performances that replicate indirect representations, and for this reason, their uncertainty as events is no longer allowed to emerge.
II The Art of Seeing
Walking along a road after rain, I see many puddles. Some are large, some small. Some spread out sideways, some lengthwise. Some show reflections of the sky, some of buildings. A casual walker may suddenly stop in front of a puddle. It does not seem especially different from the others, but for some reason he lingers in front of it. Did the puddle wink at him? Did something in the puddle display characteristics to which his sensory organs readily responded, leading to his self-awareness? Was there a well-time interaction between an erogenous zone in the puddle and his sensory receptors? Whatever the reason, he suddenly “sees” the vividness of the world in the puddle. Or one might say there has been a sudden “encounter” between some something here and something out there. Of course, it would not do to try to explain the content of this “encounter” or possess it by making it into an object. At a certain moment, the puddle and the person have an open relationship in which they communicate with each other. This sort of experience is what Gaston Bachelard calls “the visitation of a poetic moment” that transcends all fixed concepts and objectivity.
III The Relationship of Things
Mono-ha is the name of a major art trend or movement that occurred in Japan between the late 1960s and the latter half of the 1970s. The word “Mono-ha,” means the “school of things”. It was originally a dismissive label applied to artists who used raw physical materials without doing much of anything to them. Mono-ha artists used acrylics sheets, neon tubes, cement, steel plates, light bulbs, electrical outlets, wire, stone, earth, fire, wood, charcoal, and oil etc. They were placed in temporary spatial combinations including the ground surface (e.g., a steel rod resting on a larger rock), in mid-air, room interiors and so forth. The approach was based on an attitude of bringing out the mutual relationship of the various elements rather than using things and space as materials for realizing an idea. Instead of making objects, the Mono-ha artists attempt to de-objectify them. For example, Sekine Nobuo dug a cylindrical hole in the ground in a park in Kobe in the summer of 1968 and piled up the dirt removed from the hole in the same cylindrical shape on the ground next to it, creating a configuration of concave and convex shapes. In the Paris Youth Biennale held in 1971, Enokura Koji erected a concrete block wall between two pine trees about 8 meters apart. In a museum in Kyoto, I prepared long measuring tape made of rubber, stretching out and holding it down with heavy stones at different intervals to show the uncertainty of space and the perception of distance.
These events disturbed ordinary perceptions and preconceived ideas about what is real or not real. They direct attention to the trickiness and illusory quality of seeing, attacking the concept of the object of sight, the physical thing, and reexamining the reality that appears in front of our eyes. While Mono-ha artist also paint and sculpt, there is no trickiness involved in their making and they did not call attention to the material qualities of their work. Rather, they focus on the relationship between thing and thing, the multi-dimensionality of surfaces, the process of composition, and the mixed qualities of space, including negative or empty space. By this means, seeing was freed from objectivity or closed meanings, and art becomes an encounter with otherness, the unmediated presence of nature and things that transcend the artist’s subjective intentions.