Born in Korea in 1936, Lee Ufan has occupied a unique position in the Japanese art world since he first came to Japan in 1956. An artist, theorist, poet and teacher, he rose to prominence in the late 1960s, when he played a significant role in the formation of Mono-ha (the school of things). This avant-garde movement — drawing on both European and Asian philosophical concerns, as well as the concurrent tendencies of Conceptual art, Minimal art and Arte Povera — rejected the production of objects, focusing instead on the relationships between materials. By making temporary arrangements of raw materials, such as stone, steel, cloth and charcoal, Lee and other Mono-ha artists sought to expose the inherent properties and contingent relationships among these materials and their environment. Resisting the Euro-American modernist proposition that the artist is equal to or even potentially able to transcend the materials themselves, including their application and expressive potential, the movement sought to shift the focus of contemporary Japanese art, recognising an Asian position as essential to the contemporary Avant-garde.

Lee’s first major Mono-ha work, Phenomena and Perception B 1968/69, featured a large stone dropped onto a pane of glass laid over a sheet of rolled steel. The glass cracked on the stone’s impact, establishing a new set of relations between the three elements. Later retitled Relatum — the title of all Lee’s subsequent sculptural works — it embodied the fundamental principles and materials that he has employed ever since in a sequence of seemingly endless permutations. Relatum 2002 features four iron plates and four stones in a simple square configuration, placing natural and man-made materials in a kind of equilibrium, as well as spatial tension. As Lee has written:

. . . both steel plates and stones slip away from existence in different ways. A steel plate, because it is a signpost on a path to something else, exists as something that is not there. A stone, because it blends into the world as part of nature, does not exist as something that is there.¹

It is possible to view Lee’s art, particularly his sculptural works, as a succession of acts, gestures and sequences — frequently repeated — where the subtleties within each variation are as important as any newly introduced material or context. This is equally true of his paintings and prints; early series such as ‘From Point’ and ‘From Line’ feature restricted palettes and systematic, repeated gestures, with each stroke slightly different from all the others. The temporality of the painting process is made clear, both within each canvas and across the series over time. Lee’s later series ‘With Winds’ 1987–91 saw a shift to a looser approach, ‘in which free and dynamic brushstrokes stir up deeply empty space, like leaves in an autumnal gust’.²

Lee’s interest in empty space became more evident in his series ‘Correspondance’ 1991–2006, which features single strokes of thick black or grey paint on white or off-white canvases (e.g. Correspondance 2002). As with Relatum, a dynamic relationship is established between each element of the work, in this case between the dark brushstroke and the pale ground. The deliberately unmade space in his works, which he refers to as yohaku (resonant space), is not empty, but contains everything. It recalls the Buddhist concept of sanyata (emptiness), which is not nothingness, but rather the ‘true nature’ of existence.

Through the creation of simple gestures using unmediated materials, Lee Ufan activates the energies vibrating within the void, rendering physical the encounter between our inner world and our external reality.

Endnotes

1. Lee Ufan, ‘Steel plates and stones’, in Jean Fisher (ed.), The Art of Encounter [exhibition catalogue], Lisson Gallery, London, 2004, p.130.
2. Alexandra Munroe, ‘Stand still a moment’, in Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity [exhibition catalogue], Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2011, p.29.