Lee Ufan, Lisson Gallery

The publicity of Asian artists in the West remains patchily inadequate, but one figure who deserves more attention is Korean artist Lee Ufan, a founding member of both the Japanese Mono-ha and Korean Dansekhawa groups of the late 1960s and early ‘70s.
Lee Ufan: Versailles 2014
You might recognise Lee Ufan from his sculptures installed in the Chateau de Versailles briefly last year, when the simple stone and steel of his Relatum series counterbalanced the formal gardens of the palace.
Lee Ufan Lisson Gallery exhibition 2015
In this new show, Lisson Gallery, London showcases several of Lee’s recent works, comprising large-scale paintings and an installation of marble and glass. Lee’s two distinct working methods seen in this show have strong connections to minimalism and Japanese zen Buddhism. In his celebrated Dialogue paintings, delicate brushstrokes form a single sweep of paint across the canvas. Lee has described this form as directed towards an economy of representation, in search of the maximum possible resonance. This goal is also visible in his rock sculptures, which, as far as possible, show nothing of the artist’s hand in their construction.
This sparce, elegant show is an insight into one of the formative artists in the contemporary East Asian art world.