Lee Ufan

Lee Ufan is recognized for his unconventional artistic processes which underscore the relationship between the viewer, the artwork, and the spaces they inhabit and for philosophical writings that challenge prevailing notions of artmaking with attention on spatial and temporal conditions.

Lee Ufan studied at the School of Art at Seoul National University and later Nihon University in Tokyo, where he graduated with a degree in philosophy in 1961. Lee’s development of Mono-ha in the late 1960s was developed from Eastern philosophical teachings on being and nothingness as well as profound feelings towards nature. In the mid-1970s, Lee Ufan became one of the major exponents of Koran Dansaekhwa (‘Monochrome Painting’), a style that became one of the country's most important artistic developments in the 20th century—and the first from that period to bring the movement to Japan. Along with the group's other loosely connected members, Lee Ufan emphasised materiality as a means of producing relationships that link objects to viewers. In the repetitive gestural marks of his work, abstraction served to register the body's movement as well as the passage of time. With an eye towards modernist abstraction's best-known devices—seriality, gesture, grids and monochrome—Lee's paintings pushed the bounds of formalist paradigms. And through their affinity to and correspondence with Euro-American art, they proffered new forms of connection across seemingly incompatible ideological positions.

Lee Ufan's more recent and ongoing 'Dialogue' series, begun around 2006, considers philosophical notions of emptiness and fullness. These exist within a lineage of work that dates back to earlier works such as the 'From Line', 'From Point' and 'From Winds' series, which in the 1970s marked his transition from relatively small strokes predominantly in blue and orange to the intermixing of those colours and the predominance of grey tones from the 1980s.

In 2010, the Lee Ufan Museum opened at the Benesse Art Site in Naoshima, Japan. Lee’s works are also held in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Seoul Museum of Arts, and the Tate Gallery in London, among others. The artist currently lives and works between Kamakura, Japan and Paris, France.