Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, October 20, 2021:Lee Ufan, a Korean minimalist painter and sculptor

Painter, sculptor, writer and philosopher Lee Ufan (1936) came to prominence in the late 1960s as one of the major theoretical and practical proponents of the avant-garde Mono-ha (Object School) group.

Lee Ufan was raised by his parents and Confucian grandfather. Lee studied painting at the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University for just two months and moved to Yokohama, Japan in 1956, where he earned a degree in philosophy in 1961. Whilst studying philosophy painted in a restrained, traditional Japanese style, eschewing the expressive abstraction of the contemporary Japanese Gutai movement. After graduating from the university in Japan, 1961, he threw himself against the South–North unification movement and the military regime. In 1964, Lee was arrested and tortured by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA).

Lee spent his early working years pursuing careers as an art critic, philosopher, and artist. In Japan he became an active participant in the countercultural upheavals surrounding the Anpo Movement of the 1960s. He came to prominence in the late 1960s as one of the founders and theoretical leaders of the avant garde Mono-ha (School of Thing) group. Mono-Ha was related in Arte Povera movement of the 1960s and Japan's first contemporary art movement to gain international recognition. The Mono-Ha school of thought rejected Western notions of representation, choosing to focus on the relationships of materials and perceptions rather than on expression or intervention. The movement's goal was to embrace the world at large and encourage the fluid coexistence of numerous beings, concepts, and experiences. Lee U-fan's position in the philosophy department at Nihon University in Tokyo earned him a distinguished role as the movement's spokesman. In 1973, he was appointed Professor of Tama Art University in Tokyo and he stayed there until 2007.[15] Yoshio Itagaki was one of his students in 1989–1991. He is Professor emeritus at Tama Art University.

In the mid-1970s Lee introduced Korean five artists whom called later Dansaekzo Whehwa (Monotone Painting) school to Japan, which offered a fresh approach to abstraction by presenting repetitive gestural marks as bodily records of time's perpetual passage.

Lee's sculptures, presenting dispersed arrangements of stones together with industrial materials like steel plates, rubber sheets, and glass panes, recast the discrete object as a network of relations based on parity between the viewer, materials, and site. In his sculptural series Relatum, each work consists of one or more light-colored round stones and dark, rectangular iron plates.

From his first solo exhibition in Japan in 1967, Lee Ufan was invited by Manfred Schneckenburger to participate in Documenta VI (1977) in Kassel, and in 1969 and 1973 he represented Korea in the Bienal de São Paulo. His work was included in the 1992 Tate Liverpool exhibition, "Working With Nature: Traditional Thought in Contemporary Art from Korea", the first major survey of Korean art shown in Britain. In 1997 he had a solo exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, Paris and in 2001 the Kunstmuseum Bonn held a major retrospective of his work. Major exhibitions of Lee's painting and sculpture were later held at the Yokohama Museum of Art in 2005 and the Musée d'art Moderne Saint-Etienne in France in December 2005. The Situation Kunst (für Max Imdahl), a museum associated with Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, opened in 2006 with a gallery devoted to a permanent installation of Lee Ufan's paintings and a garden of his sculpture. However, it was Lee's "Resonance" exhibition at Palazzo Palumbo Fossati during the 2007 Venice Biennale that won him critical acclaim and a wider audience.

In 2014, Lee was the seventh guest artist selected for the contemporary art program of the Palace of Versailles. after Jeff Koons in 2008, Xavier Veilhan in 2009, Takashi Murakami in 2010, Bernar Venet in 2011, Joana Vasconcelos in 2012 and Giuseppe Penone en 2013.

In 2019, Lee became the first single-artist to take over the entire plaza of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in the museum's 44-year existence.

Lee is represented in major museum collections including: MoMA, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Gallery, London; Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo Holland; the National Museums of Modern Art in Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka; the Yokohama Museum of Art and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul. His work is also held in the permanent collection of the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art and the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park.

Lee's paintings regularly fetch six-figure dollar sums at auction. A 1980 canvas with a series of vertical blue lines, for example, went for $410,000 at Sotheby's in New York in 2010. Lee's primary dealers are Pace Gallery, in New York and Seoul; Scai the Bathhouse, in Tokyo; and Lisson Gallery, in London, New York and Shanghai.

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