Lee Ufan’s 90th Year Brings Major Venice and New York Exhibitions
Dia Art Foundation is marking the 90th year of South Korean artist Lee Ufan (b. 1936) with a major solo exhibition at SMAC San Marco Art Centre in Venice, presented as an official Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale. At the same time, a new display of his painting and sculpture is opening at Dia Beacon in New York State. In July, his first exhibition in Portugal will open at Casa e Parque de Serralves.
Lee, who is also a sculptor, writer and philosopher, first rose to prominence in the late 1960s as a founding member of Mono-ha, the Japanese artist group that worked with natural and industrial materials to emphasize physical properties and spatial relationships. The movement rejected the primacy of the artist’s hand, a position that helped define Lee’s own long inquiry into how form, space and perception can be made visible without becoming overdetermined.
His From Point and From Line paintings, begun around the same period, are among the clearest expressions of that approach. Repeated marks register duration until the brush no longer holds pigment, turning the act of painting into a quiet measure of time. Across later paintings and sculptures, Lee has continued to build a distilled visual language around presence and absence, and around the tension between what is made and what is left unmade.
In the interview, Lee says Barnett Newman’s 1971 exhibition at MoMA had a decisive effect on his thinking. He saw the show after the Paris Biennale, at a moment when critics in Japan and Europe were declaring the age of painting over. Newman’s work, he recalls, seemed to him like spatial painting, but not something he could simply imitate. Instead, the encounter led him back to childhood calligraphy in Korea, where he learned points and lines, and to the idea that the body itself could register the passage of time.
Lee also reflects on earlier work from 1967, including a piece made by dropping a stone onto glass, which he describes as violent and destructive. That early severity has given way to a practice that seeks dialogue rather than assertion. He says he has long been skeptical of art that places the artist at the center, preferring instead to accept and express what comes from outside.
The Venice exhibition and the concurrent presentation at Dia Beacon place that philosophy in sharp relief. Together, they trace a career shaped by movement between Korea, Japan, Europe and the United States, and by a sustained effort to reconcile Eastern and Western ideas without reducing either to a fixed identity. For Lee, the result is not synthesis for its own sake, but a patient search for a language adequate to time, space and metaphysics.
