32 Facts About Lee Ufan

Lee Ufan is a Korean minimalist painter, sculptor, and academic, known for innovative bodies of work emphasizing process, materials, and the experiential engagement of viewer and site, and critiques of European phenomenology.

Lee Ufan's writings, published in rapid succession from 1969, have sought to externalize the interface between ideas and sensibilities from the West, namely Western Europe and the United States, and those found in East Asia.

Many commentators stress Lee Ufan's stated desire to escape, or refute, Western ideas of signification, for example.

Lee Ufan states that he had always favored literature over painting and was a bookworm by nature, reading extensively in a wide variety of fields, including philosophy, culture, and art.

Nonetheless, in 1956, Lee Ufan began studying painting at the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University, one of Korea's most prestigious schools of higher learning.

Shortly after enrolling, Lee Ufan's father asked him to travel to Japan to take some medicine to an uncle, who was unwell.

Once there, Lee Ufan's uncle suggested that he stay and study literature and philosophy at a Japanese university.

In 1964, Lee Ufan was arrested and tortured by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency.

Lee Ufan spent his early working years pursuing a career as an art critic, philosopher, and artist.

Lee Ufan had his first solo exhibition at the Sato Gallery in Tokyo in March 1967 and a large-scale show of contemporary Korean painting at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo the following year.

In 1969, Lee Ufan wrote the essay "From Object to Being," applying his philosophical principles to aesthetic concerns, which was then counted as one of the major critical studies opening up an international dialogue for Japanese modern art.

Significant for Lee Ufan's thinking around the encounter and systems of power were the writings of Michel Foucault, popular among Japanese intellectuals in the late 1960s and after.

In March 1969, Lee Ufan won a writing competition sponsored by the major Japanese art publishing house Bijutsu Shuppansha for new critics.

Lee Ufan has since served as Professor emeritus at Tama Art University.

Lee Ufan began first exhibiting artwork in Japan in the late 1960s, during which time he came to prominence as one of the founders and theoretical leaders of the avant-garde Mono-ha group.

Lee Ufan describes the period of hyper-accelerated industrialization in Europe as well as Japan in the second half of the 1960s, the May 1968 student protests in Paris, and the countercultural movement in New York around 1967 and 1968 as catalysts for discussions regarding artistic production and the act of making.

Lee Ufan's paintings are considered to evoke, but refuse, the gestural spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism, while being reminiscent of Korean munjado, a form of calligraphy where gesture and the materiality of line work against the demands of representation.

For example, in a work titled Relatum, first produced in 1968 and reproduced in 2010, Lee Ufan dropped a rock from a small height on to a square mirror laid over a steel plate.

In sculpture, Lee Ufan explored similar formal interests using minimal means: typically, he favored stone and sheets of iron, though he employed cotton, glass and wood during the Mono-ha period.

Lee Ufan's sculptures, presenting dispersed arrangements of stones together with industrial materials, recast the discrete object as a network of relations based on parity between the viewer, materials, and site.

In 1991 Lee Ufan began his series of Correspondence paintings, which consist of just one or two grey-blue brushstrokes, made of a mixture of oil and crushed stone pigment to intensify the color, applied onto a large white surface.

From his first solo exhibition in Japan in 1967, Lee Ufan was invited by Manfred Schneckenburger to participate in Documenta VI in Kassel, Germany, and in 1969 and 1973 he represented Korea in the Bienal de Sao Paulo.

In 1971, Lee Ufan was chosen as one of the representatives of Korea to the Paris Biennale.

Lee Ufan's work was included in the 1992 Tate Liverpool exhibition, Working With Nature: Traditional Thought in Contemporary Art from Korea, the first major survey of Korean art shown in the UK In 1997, Lee Ufan had a solo exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, and in 2001 the Kunstmuseum Bonn held a major retrospective of his work.

Major exhibitions of Lee Ufan's painting and sculpture were later held at the Yokohama Museum of Art in 2005 and the Musee d'art Moderne Saint-Etienne in France in December 2005.

In 2011, Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity was exhibited at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York City, organized by curator Alexandra Munroe, with over 90 works, from the 1960s to the present.

In 2014, Lee Ufan was the seventh guest artist selected for the contemporary art program of the Palace of Versailles, following Jeff Koons in 2008, Xavier Veilhan in 2009, Takashi Murakami in 2010, Bernar Venet in 2011, Joana Vasconcelos in 2012, and Giuseppe Penone in 2013.

In 2019, Lee Ufan became the first single-artist to take over the entire plaza of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in the museum's 44-year existence.

Lee Ufan is represented in major museum collections including: MoMA, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Gallery, London; Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo Holland; the National Museums of Modern Art in Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka; the Yokohama Museum of Art and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul.

In 1997, Lee Ufan was invited to serve as visiting professor at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Lee Ufan received the UNESCO Prize at the Shanghai Biennale in 2000; the Ho-Am Prize of the Samsung Foundation in Korea in 2001; and the 13th Praemium Imperiale for painting in 2001.

In 2022, Lee Ufan opened a museum in Arles, France, in the 16th-century Hotel Vernon renovated by Tadao Ando.