Lee Ufan

The beautiful companion volume to Lee Ufan's largest site-specific outdoor sculpture project in the U.S. In fall 2019, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden debuted 10 new specially commissioned outdoor sculptures from celebrated Korean artist Lee Ufan. This book accompanies the expansive installation, which features sculptures from the artist's signature and continuing "Relatum" series and marks the first exhibition of Lee's work in the nation's capital. For the first time in the Hirshhorn Museum's 44-year history, its 4.3-acre outdoor plaza will be devoted entirely to the work of a single artist, and this book is a beautiful commemoration or keepsake of that event. Lee is a founder of the late 1960s artistic movement Mono-ha, or "School of Things," so his artwork represents an encounter between the viewer, the materials, and the site. The sculptures in this installation and book reflect this: all of the sculptures respond to the museum's unique architecture and continue Lee's iconic practice of placing contrasting materials, such as stainless steel plates and boulders, in dialogue with one another to heighten awareness of the world. The book features more than 100 color illustrations, including preliminary sketches, photographs of the artist selecting materials for the work, images of the installation process, shots of installed sculptures, details of installed sculptures, and more. Accompanying these powerful images are a foreword, essays, artist interview, and short captions that highlight how the works are rooted in contemplation and sensation rather than static representation. Lee Ufan: Open Dimension offers readers an intimate look at the work, artistic process, and impact of one of the pioneering figures of postwar art.

"The first North American museum retrospective devoted to artist, philosopher, and poet Lee Ufan (b. 1936, Korea), Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity charts Lee's creation of a visual, conceptual, and theoretical language that has radicalized and expanded the possibilities for sculpture and painting. Deeply versed in modern philosophy, Lee is an influential writer on aesthetics and contemporary art and is recognized as the key theorist of Mono-ha, an antiformalist, materials-based art movement that developed in Tokyo in the late 1960s."--Book jacket.

Text assembled from writings by Lee Ufan published in catalogues, magazines and newspapers between 1967 and 2003.

Lee Ufan is a major figure of contemporary art. In 2011, his exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, demonstrated the universal character of his creations. Born in Korea, he initially worked on poetry and philosophy. He went on to produce his first works in Japan before his reputation developed internationally. His classical training inspires universalism and artistic movements engendering form, space, and natural and human creations. His radical work, with its minimalist movement, seems directed at the music of the spheres rather than the murmuring of the world. He is never far from the headlines, and his sovereign work appears as an antidote to our image- saturated civilisation. This original monograph, the first published in French, brings together Lee Ufans complete iconography, as well as biographical documents. In an exclusive interview with Michel Enrici, for the first time he revealed details of his childhood and looks at how his career developed from cultural specificity to universality, while covering his moral, intellectual, and aesthetic positions. There is also a theoretical article analysing the critical and philosophical response to Lee Ufans work over four decades.

One girl, one painting a day...can she do it? Linda Patricia Cleary decided to challenge herself with a year long project starting on January 1, 2014. Choose an artist a day and create a piece in tribute to them. It was a fun, challenging, stressful and psychological experience. She learned about technique, art history, different materials and embracing failure. Here are all 365 pieces. Enjoy!

Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha is the most comprehensive study in English to date on the postwar Japanese movement Mono-ha (School of Things), and examines the group's practice in Tokyo between 1968-1972 at the height of the nation's political upheaval against the US-Japan Security Treaty, anti-Vietnam War protests and its oil crisis. The Mono-ha artists--who included Noburu Sekine, Lee Ufan, Kishio Suga and Koji Enokura--all distinguished themselves through an aesthetic detachment that, instead of "creating" things, strove instead to "rearrange" them into artworks that interacted with the spaces around them. While sharing certain traits with the Land Art and Minimalism movements that were taking place in the United States, and the Arte Povera movement in Italy, Mono-ha was ultimately a rejection of the Euro-American avant-garde and is now synonymous with the beginnings of contemporary art in Japan.

South Korean-born artist Lee Ufan, who came to prominence in the late-1960s as part of the Japanese Mono-ha (Object School) group, has consistently focused on challenging the delineations between sculpture and painting. This gives his work many stylistic affinities with American Minimalism: "Relatum-Kiss" (1986), for example, is a floor piece consisting of two stones resting on Carl Andre-esque iron plates. Ufan's theoretical writings are also a significant part of his oeuvre; they refer heavily to philosophy--which he studied in Tokyo before co-founding Mono-ha. "It is difficult to say what is perfect or what is balanced, but the movement of vision in relation to similarity and difference is endless," he has written, in a characteristic meditation on aesthetics. Ufan has been exhibiting his work internationally since the early 70s. This monograph places him in context with his peers, and engages in a socio-historical examination of his theoretical writing.

A crucial artistic movement of twentieth-century Korea, Tansaekhwa (monochromatic painting) also became one of its most famous and successful. In this full-color, richly illustrated account--the first of its kind in English--Joan Kee provides a fresh interpretation of the movement's emergence and meaning that sheds new light on the history of abstraction, twentieth-century Asian art, and contemporary art in general.