ABOUT Lee U-Fan

Lee Ufan (b. 1936, Gyeongsangnam-do, South Korea), currently based in Japan and active internationally, is a member of the last generation of Korean artists who received a traditional Confucian education.
In particular, he played a central role among the young "Mono-ha" artists who emerged at the end of the 1960s, and is known to have had a major influence on the course of contemporary art in Japan. He also played an active role in introducing the Mono-ha to Europe.

The Mono-ha is an artistic movement that uses stone, wood, paper, cotton, iron sheets, paraffin, and other "objects" as they are, with little or no modification. In Lee Ufan work, the "painted" parts are very few. Some people may be a bit confused. However, when you stand in front of the painting, a single stroke of a brush stroke corresponds with the blank space on the screen, giving you a sense of boundless expanse. Lee Ufan has been tackling this difficult problem for more than 30 years.
Lee Ufan art is an art of marginality, in which "making" is minimal, yet maximally communicative. He removes the subjectivity from his works, freeing them as much as possible from the guidance of the artist, and through his work, he casts a sharp critical eye on contemporary issues from a position that transcends the boundaries of the West and the East.

The whole universe starts from a point and returns to a point. A dot calls for a new dot, and so on into a line.
Lee Ufan single stroke is full of tremendous strength hidden in a minimal expression, and gives us a sense of a vast and infinite world.

The Lee Ufan Museum, his first private museum in collaboration with Tadao Ando, is now open on Naoshima.