Lee U-fan

Life and work

Lee Ufan was born in 1936 in Haman County, in the south of what is now South Korea, and grew up under Japanese colonial rule. His first contact with art was ink brush painting, taught at home by a Confucian grandfather and continued as a schoolboy in Seoul. He enrolled at the College of Fine Arts of Seoul National University but left after two months, crossing to Japan on a family errand and staying on at an uncle's suggestion. He took a degree in philosophy at Nihon University in Tokyo, reading Heidegger closely, and spent his early working years as a critic and a philosopher as much as an artist. He showed on his own for the first time at the Sato Gallery in Tokyo in 1967.

Mono ha and the writing

Lee is unusual among artists of his generation in that his reputation rests on his essays as firmly as on his objects. His study of the sculptor Nobuo Sekine, and the text From Object to Being that followed, argued for presenting the world as it is rather than representing it, and for an encounter in which the viewer, not the artist, activates the work. Those pieces were seized on by young Japanese artists and gave the loose group around him its programme. Mono ha, the school of things, rejected the European idea of making in favour of placing: a rock, a steel plate, a sheet of glass, set in relation and left to be met. He taught at Tama Art University in Tokyo for more than three decades and holds a chair there as professor emeritus.

The painting

His best known paintings come from two series begun in the early seventies, From Point and From Line. In each the brush is charged once with mineral pigment ground into animal skin glue, then drawn across or down the canvas until the paint is spent, so that a single stroke fades from a thick ridge to nothing. Lee calls that fading yohaku, the art of emptiness. The Correspondence canvases that followed reduce the picture to one or two grey blue marks on a large white field, and the Dialogue series, made with very wide flat brushes, to a single square of paint that is in fact many layers. He completes no more than about twenty five works in a year.

Sculpture and public work

Since the early seventies every sculpture has carried the title Relatum. The form is consistent: upright iron plates or glass panes meeting stones laid flat, arranged so that the relation between the made and the unmade is the subject. He represented Korea at the Bienal de Sao Paulo in 1969 and was invited to Documenta in Kassel in 1977. British audiences met the work at Tate Liverpool in 1992. Museum solo shows followed at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1997, the Kunstmuseum Bonn in 2001 and the Yokohama Museum of Art in 2005. The Venice showing of 2007 widened his audience sharply, and the Guggenheim in New York gave him his first major American retrospective in 2011. He was the guest of the Palace of Versailles in 2014, took over the whole Hirshhorn plaza in Washington in 2019, and installed in the Rijksmuseum garden in Amsterdam in 2024. Two museums bearing his name, both designed by Tadao Ando, stand on Naoshima and in Arles.

A note on the name

The house catalogues him as Lee U Fan, with the given name split across two syllables. That is a romanisation variant of the same artist and not a different person; the form used by his galleries and by museums is Lee Ufan.

The market

He is represented by Pace, Lisson and Scai the Bathhouse. At Bonhams in Hong Kong in 2017 a small From Point of the mid eighties, pigment on canvas, carrying a Tokyo Gallery label on the reverse and a note of confirmation from that gallery, made a strong six figure sum in Hong Kong dollars. The early series command the most, size matters less than period, and provenance running back to the Tokyo dealers who showed him first carries real weight.