Lee Ufan, the Artist Who Turned a Stone and a Steel Plate Into a Philosophy

Lee Ufan

Born	June 24, 1936 Seoul
Occupation	Sculptor
Awards	Order of Cultural Merit · Ho-Am Prize in the Arts · Legion of Honour

Lee Ufan has spent most of his working life trying to do less. A boulder set down in front of a sheet of raw steel. One grey stroke dragged across a wall-sized canvas until the brush runs dry. He calls this an art of encounter rather than of making, and he has argued for it in essays and in museum gardens from Naoshima to Versailles. The trouble, if it is one, is that the minimum has become unmistakable. Collectors spot a Lee across a crowded fair, the auction houses know what each stroke is worth, and the artist who set out to step back from the object now stands, at ninety, at the centre of a celebration of his own name that stretches across five countries.

The habit of looking hard at very little came early. He grew up in the south of the Korean peninsula while it was still under Japanese rule, in Haman County and later in Busan, where a Confucian grandfather saw to his calligraphy, ink painting and Chinese classics at home. Lee has said he always preferred books to brushes. He enrolled to study painting at Seoul National University, lasted only a matter of months, and then crossed to Japan on a family errand, carrying medicine to an ailing uncle. The uncle told him to stay. He did, and read philosophy instead.

By 1961 Lee, who was born on 24 June 1936, had a philosophy degree from Nihon University in Tokyo, with Martin Heidegger as his particular obsession. A short return to South Korea put him at odds with the military government, and by the mid-1960s he was back in Japan, writing as much as he painted. His first solo show opened at the Sato Gallery in Tokyo in March 1967. In 1969 his essay “From Object to Being” won a critics’ prize, and his writing on the sculptor Nobuo Sekine gave an argument to what Sekine had done in a park in Kobe in 1968: dug a deep cylindrical hole and stood the excavated earth beside it as a column. That work, Phase—Mother Earth, became the founding object of Mono-ha, the School of Things.

Lee became the movement’s theorist and its most fluent voice. His essays, gathered in 1971 as In Search of Encounter, argued that art should stop manufacturing images and instead bring things, people and space into contact, presenting the world, in his phrase, as it is. The sculpture followed the writing. In Phenomena and Perception B he dropped a stone onto a glass plate and let the cracks run wherever they wanted. From the early 1970s he gave nearly all his sculpture a single title, Relatum: stones beside steel plates, glass, cotton or rubber, each one a relationship rather than an object. Four decades later he restaged the glass piece at the Guggenheim, crouching over the plate with the boulder in his hands.

Painting came back in a stricter form. The From Point and From Line series, first shown at Tokyo Gallery in 1973, are made with ground mineral pigment bound in animal-skin glue, the materials of the nihonga tradition he had absorbed. Each mark is loaded once and repeated until the brush is spent, so the points and lines fade across the canvas like a breath running out. In 1975 Lee advised on Five Korean Artists, Five Kinds of White at the same gallery, the show with Park Seo-bo and four other painters that launched dansaekhwa, Korean monochrome painting, as a movement. He taught at Tama Art University from 1973 until 2007 and has long divided his time between Kamakura and Paris.

The later work strips away almost everything. With Winds, painted between 1987 and 1991, let looser, quicker strokes cross the surface. Correspondence, begun in 1991, cut the canvas down to one or two grey-blue marks of oil and crushed stone, and the Dialogue paintings of the past two decades set a single square stroke, built up in many layers, against a wide field of white. The institutions followed: a first American retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2011, the gardens of Versailles in 2014, the entire plaza of the Hirshhorn in Washington in 2019. Three museums now carry his name: one on the island of Naoshima designed by Tadao Ando in 2010, the Space Lee Ufan in Busan since 2015, and Lee Ufan Arles, in a mansion Ando renovated, since 2022.

That success is where the argument gets uncomfortable. An art of not-making turned out to be extremely legible, and a single grey stroke is easy to recognise and, as the market learned, easy to copy. A From Line canvas from 1976 sold at Sotheby’s in 2014 for $2,165,000, and between 2000 and 2011 more of his works made the hundred highest prices at Korean auctions than anyone else’s. In 2016 Seoul police and the National Forensic Service declared thirteen paintings attributed to him to be forgeries. Lee examined the canvases himself, said they were his, and complained that investigators had pressed him to concede some of them. The courts sided with the police: in 2017 Seoul judges sent the dealers and a painter behind the fakes to prison for terms of up to seven years. It left an awkward question over an artist who speaks of taking the self out of the work: if the hand matters so little, who decides which hand it was? The art historian Joan Kee once called him the man who was everywhere and nowhere, and the phrase cuts both ways.

None of it has slowed him down. Lee turned ninety on 24 June, and the year has been arranged around him. Dia opened a long-term presentation at Dia Beacon in May, drawing on eight paintings he gave the foundation in 2025, and a survey at the San Marco Art Centre in Venice, a Biennale collateral event open until 22 November. In July the Palais des Papes in Avignon opened four installations reworked for the chapels, kitchen and cloister of the papal palace, part of the celebrations for 140 years of diplomatic relations between France and Korea; they stay until 15 November. On 16 October the Serralves Foundation in Porto opens Fragments of Infinity, his first major exhibition in Portugal, with a painting made for the villa.

Then comes Cologne. The Museum Ludwig will present him with the Wolfgang Hahn Prize on 6 November and open a solo exhibition the following day, running until 4 April 2027, with up to €100,000 set aside to buy his work for its collection. Lee has always said the stone matters as much as the hand that places it. In Cologne, as in Porto and Avignon this autumn, the hand will still be his.

Tags: art, artists, Lee Ufan, Korean art, From Line, From Point