Lee Ufan

Lee Ufan (Korean: 이우환, Hanja: 李禹煥, born 1936 in Haman County, in South Kyongsang province in Korea) 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.

Having lived and worked in Japan for much of his professional life, Lee has been honored by the Japanese government for having "contributed to the development of contemporary art in Japan."

Born in Haman-gun, Gyeongsangnam-do in 1936, Lee Ufan grew up during the period of Japanese colonization of Korea.

Raised by his parents and Confucian grandfather, Lee's first exposure to visual art was through inkbrush painting, in which he received instruction as a child, and later as a high school student in Seoul.

Nonetheless, in 1956, Lee 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's father asked him to travel to Japan to take some medicine to an uncle, who was unwell.

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

After only two months at Seoul National University, Lee withdrew and moved to Yokohama, Japan, in 1956, where he earned a degree in philosophy with a special interest in the work of Martin Heidegger in 1961 at Nihon University, Tokyo.

After graduating from Nihon University, Lee threw himself against the South–North unification movement and the military regime.

His essay "Sonzai to mu wo koete Sekine Nobuo ron (Beyond Being and Nothingness – A Thesis on Sekine Nobuo)" is largely considered an originator of thought for the post-war Japanese art movement of Mono-ha ("School of Things") in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

His work largely advocates for a methodology of de-westernization and de-modernization in both theory and practice as an antidote to the Eurocentric thought of 1960s postwar Japanese society.

A self-proclaimed wanderer and lifelong cultural border-crosser, Lee divides his time between Kamakura, Japan, and Paris, France.

Significant for Lee'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.

Elements of this approach, particularly the attention to surface, and Lee's investment in Korean Dansaekhwa, were later crucial in forming the ideas of Mono-ha in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In the 1960s, Lee began teaching at an independent art school called "B-Semi" (Contemporary Art Basic Seminar) run by the abstract painter Kobayashi Akio.

During this time, Lee was primarily interested in bodily perception and in the stages leading up to an artwork.

Careful to place his emphasis on "things" rather than "concepts," he would have his students ponder the movement of their hand, the possibilities of gestures, or the perception of phenomena while grasping a pencil, crushing paper, or twisting clay, as well as the dynamics of one's relationship to space (outdoor/indoor, public/living).

Lee's own theories would also take cues from an understanding of the writings of Belgian mathematician and philosopher Jean Ladrière, whose decidedly phenomenological bent cohered well with Lee's other philosophical sympathies that encompass Nishida Kitarō's theories of bashō (place) and mu (nothingness), and the emphasis on perception espoused by Merleau-Ponty.

Lee's position in the philosophy department at Nihon University in Tokyo earned him a distinguished role as the movement's spokesman.

In 1964, Lee was arrested and tortured by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA).

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

He 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.

His 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's stated desire to escape, or refute, Western ideas of signification, for example.

As the main theorist of the Mono-ha movement in Japan, Lee was trained as a philosopher.

As a painter, Lee contributed to "Korean Monotone Art" (Dansaekjo Yesul, 單色調 藝術), the first artistic movement in 20th century Korea to be promoted in Japan.

In 1969, Lee 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.

In it, he first wrote of his desire to present "the world (sekai) as it is."

Closely bound to this idea was that of the "encounter" (deai), or the point at which human beings initiated a relationship with the material world.

Transposed onto the experiences of showing and viewing art, Lee's emphasis on the encounter demanded a reallocation of agency between the artist and the viewer.

In lieu of a schematic whereby the artwork passively transmits the artist's intention to the equally passive viewer, the artwork is activated only upon the viewer's sustained engagement with the terms of its material and physical presence.

The year after "From Object to Being," Lee published a collection of critical pieces as the manifesto-like antholoy "In Search of an Encounter," which was published in the art journal Bijutsu techō (Art Notebook) accompanying a seminal Mono-ha roundtable, and was fervently embraced by young Japanese artists while sparking off a "Lee Ufan fever" in Korea.

Though he has won recognition for large critical essays, other smaller works include "Snake" and "The Acropolis and the Pebble," appearing in his essay collection The Swift Current of Time, elaborate casually on random thoughts and insights gleaned from everyday life.

These texts have frequently been taught in Japanese high school textbooks.

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

Then, during the Ninth Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in May of that year, he won a prize for his work Words and Things.

Consisting of three enormous pieces of paper laid flat on the exhibition surface, the title of the work was a direct allusion to Michel Foucault's Les mots et les choses (The Order of Things).

While he studied philosophy, Lee began painting in a restrained, traditional Japanese style, eschewing the expressive abstraction of the contemporary Japanese Gutai movement.

He states in a 2015 interview: "At that time in Korea, and also in Japan, there was a tradition, especially in old fashioned families, in which boys were given personal education at home. This included painting, calligraphy, and the reading of Chinese classics. But this was part of the general culture of a civilized man. By doing calligraphy, you learnt how to write, by drawing and reading literature we gained our culture."

Lee 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.