LEE UFAN
I MET LEE UFAN in Venice this past spring. I was coming from Berlin, where I’d just seen his retrospective at Hamburger Bahnhof—Museum für Gegenwart. That show—a sweep through five decades of stimulating, philosophically inclined sculpture and painting—began with Lee’s early Relatum sculptures of the late 1960s (Relatum is the title he gives all his sculptures), moving through the thick, minerally strokes of his “From Point” and “From Line” paintings of ca. 1973–83 (bodies of work that brought down the house at Yamamoto Takashi’s Tokyo Gallery in the ’70s) and coming full circle with a new group of Relatum pieces. This cyclical aspect is typical of Lee, whose precise and uncompromising art remains fresh despite his decades-long use of the same basic materials of stone, mirrored glass, and steel.
An artist and a philosopher, Lee was a close reader of Western thinkers such as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (he titled a pair of early works Phenomena and Perception A, 1968, and Phenomena and Perception B, 1968/69), and his art achieves an equivalent kind of phenomenological “unbracketing,” snapping perception free from the harness of embedded habits. Lee also attended Michel Foucault’s lectures in Tokyo in 1970, and the French theorist’s revolutionary approach to hierarchies of power—his foregrounding of horizontality and relation—finds a subtle echo in the approachability and simplicity of Lee’s unassuming sculptures and paintings. (A 1969 work was called Words and Things.)
© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
Lee is busy. The octogenarian now has his own museum in Arles, France, and this past August a six-decade survey of his work opened at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. These exhibitions solidify Lee’s role as a key mover of Mono-ha, or the School of Things, one of the major artistic tendencies in postwar art in Asia. Less a school than a loose coterie, the group—which counted Nobuo Sekine, Kishio Suga, and Susumu Koshimizu among its members—used natural objects and industrial materials to construct anti-representational propositions that emphasized relationships, simplicity, reduction, and space.
Yet in spite of his centrality to Mono-ha, Lee was also something of an outlier, occupying a position suspended between nationalities and artistic traditions. Born in Korea in 1936 during the ravages of Japanese colonization, Lee emigrated to Japan in 1958 (and was judged harshly by some Koreans for doing so); his work is central to tansaekhwa, the postwar movement of Korean monochrome painting; and he once saw his participation in the Fifth Japan Art Festival at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1970–71) blocked by Japanese co-organizers because of his Korean heritage. Lee’s work cautions against conceptual ossification. He shows how observation itself can be active, free, and spontaneous—a way of getting to, as Husserl suggests, “the things themselves.”
—Pablo Larios
Mono-ha came out of this sense that we needed to limit our production. Instead of making, it was just important not to make.
I USE VERY FEW MATERIALS in my work. When I decide to make a painting, I choose just one or two brushes and make only a few brushstrokes. That’s because I want viewers to perceive the things I did not paint as much as the things I did.
I work from a small studio outside Tokyo where I also live. From time to time, I’ve visited other artists’ studios around the world and found huge spaces for churning out big productions. The room I work within is tiny, maybe a tenth of the size of those artists’ workplaces. But even if my studio is small, it doesn’t follow that my work is small.
There’s a theory in Asia that the tiniest rooms enable one to think about the cosmos. That’s why I prefer small spaces: so I can consider the universe in complete silence. I don’t have assistants. I work in my space, in my room, completely alone. I think with my time, with my hands, and in contact with the world. It’s how I make, think, and live.
Installation view, Palazzo Diedo, Venice. Photo: Massimo Pistore.
© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
We need space, distance, and perspective to construct our own ideas about experience. But these days, technology makes everything instantaneous. There is no process, no experience—only answers. I am very much against this. We must consider how we have ideas in the first place, and how we relate to nature—including human nature. As I see it, we are living through a very dangerous time, swimming through an ocean of data.
In the 1950s, I was influenced by my reading of Martin Heidegger, who alerted us to the risks of technology. As far as I’m aware, he was among the first to recognize the perils of emergent technologies. In Heidegger’s time, we faced a decision: We could develop these technologies in a positive direction, or we could use technology to change nature. The latter would be a risky choice indeed: Technology that changes nature also threatens humankind and human instincts. Today, the runaway development of technologies like artificial intelligence poses precisely such a risk.
That is why it is so important to stop and think. This is an approach that has always epitomized Mono-ha, the School of Things. The movement was born out of the mid-’60s, a moment when many of us were asking how best to approach the world. In 1968, there was a social revolution in France, a devastating war in Vietnam, and, in the US, the hippie movement and antiwar protests. In Japan, many people, including students, were taking to the streets, too. As mass production and industrialization accelerated and globalized, many of us began to think we needed a reset. Mono-ha came out of this sense that we needed to limit our production. Instead of making, it was important not to make.
All of this represented a break from modernity. By “modernity,” I am referring to the modern era, the historical point at which humankind decided to make everything in our image, and when we decided the image of the human was the most important consideration. As the human ego grew, so did the desire for more territory—all this relates to imperialism. At some point, artists began to consider their canvas their “territory,” too. In the modern era, artists came to believe that the most important thing was their images, their ideas, their concepts. Accordingly, artists privileged the inside (their concepts) over the outside (the world). But we don’t need to separate interior and exterior in this way. We can have a dialogue between them: a more open, softer concept; a relation.
That is why, for my retrospective in Berlin I included a portrait by Rembrandt: his Self-Portrait with Velvet Beret, painted in 1634 when he was twenty-eight. I have a tremendous respect for his work because he was able to look at humanity, to peer deeply into the human soul. His works show us why today, more than ever, it is so urgent to approach other people, and to look to nature again.
My newest Relatum paintings and sculptures at Palazzo Diedo in Venice are relatively simple. Beyond Venice, Relatum—the Notion of a Stone, 2024, uses a shining lightbulb to cast the shadow of a stone on a circular line painted on the floor. In another installation, Beyond Venice, Relatum—Sound box, 2024, we sense something inside a box, but we cannot see inside it; we only hear the sounds that come out, although we don’t know where the sound comes from. We are forced to look again, as if anew. All of this takes us back to my intention: Stop and think.
