New works by Korean artist Lee Ufan bring the rich hues of Australia's natural landscape into view at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.
An idea 12 years in the making, Ufan's first solo exhibition in Australia, Quiet Resonance, opened last week, showcasing four new paintings and four new site-specific iterations of sculptural works that continue his 'Relatum' series (1968–ongoing).
Curated by Melanie Eastburn in a space designed by the artist in the institution's dedicated spaces for Asian art, the exhibition is on show for a year, giving audiences an extended opportunity to engage with Lee's thoughtful and enigmatic work. A permanent sculpture commission is underway and expected to be complete by the end of the exhibition period.
Born in Korea in 1936, Lee left Korea to study philosophy in Japan in the 1950s and is the author of 17 books on the subject. He now divides his time between Japan and France, where a museum devoted to his work has recently opened in Arles, complementing another in Busan, Korea, and one on Naoshima Island, Japan.
In conversation with AGNSW Director Michael Brand, Lee commented, 'Art is not just about the visual but gives the power of the human, which I learnt from my study of philosophy.'1 Lee's philosophical bent found its expression in art through the Mono-ha movement that emerged in Japan during the social and political upheaval of the 1960s as a reaction against Western modernism. A co-founder of the movement, which translates as 'School of Things', Lee and his fellow members engaged in 'not making' art, with the belief that technology had rendered art-making obsolete, instead engaging with existing natural objects and manmade materials to create work.
Lee comments, again in conversation with Brand, 'Big cities are based on industrialisation, and they are full of thoughts and ideas; people are not embracing nature, it's hard to breathe and there is no future ... We have to create less and I have to limit myself and think about the non-manmade, and the gap in-between ... Ma, the void or emptiness, is very meaningful, between the creating and not creating; I thought we could think slowly and that would free us.'
The new iterations of Lee's 'Relatum' sculptures at AGNSW continue his long engagement with these ideas. Combining organic materials like stone with manufactured elements such as steel, Lee puts the natural and the manmade in a conversation that is activated by the viewer. His interest is piqued by the intersection of these encounters, and by the spaces in-between, where ma imparts meaning but also uncovers tension and possibility.
In works such as Relatum (1968/2024)—in which a lone boulder teeters on a bronze-hued, oiled steel plate—the tension between the two is evident: the natural object streaked with rusty minerals standing in stark contrast to the engineered product. Lee's carefully placed rocks—in this exhibition borrowed from Murrumbateman, on Ngunnawal and Wiradjuri country—undergo a kind of metamorphosis as they encounter the manmade: it seems no coincidence that they are noted on the wall labels as 'stone' alongside their manufactured counterparts of 'gravel', 'steel', and 'light globe'.
The artist exploits the human tendency to anthropomorphise even inanimate objects, and there is a sense of the natural and the manmade being in active concert with one another. For Relatum – the sound cylinder (1996/2024), a rock balances on a curved edge while its straight back hovers parallel to and mere millimetres away from the surface of a curved steel cylinder from which emanates the barely audible hum of human activity, urban noise, and birdsong, interspersed with periods of silence. The rock appears active within the installation: listening as attentively to these sounds as its human visitors do.
The performative energy of Lee's sculptures is mirrored in his method of painting. The artist uses a platform to elevate himself above the canvas, and a large brush to execute a painting in one or two strokes, his whole body engaged in the process. A wall quote notes: 'With paint-soaked brush in hand, I hold my breath and drive down a line. The moment the brush touches the canvas, an amazing encounter takes place; the empty space and stroke resonate, and an invisible force creates an animated pictorial space.'
A proponent of the Dansaekhwa monochrome painting movement of the 1950s, which sought to create a new aesthetic devoid of nationalism and tradition through abstraction, Lee here presents four paintings, collectively titled 'Response' (2022–24), which also locate meaning in the energy between the painted and unpainted spaces. Within the singular brushstroke—as shades melt from the white of dawn, to the hot yellows and rusty oranges of the day, into the green-blues of twilight, before sinking into midnight black—we witness the colours of the Australian landscape as seen in the Murrumbateman rocks. In this one stroke, the cycle of day and night, and that of the universe itself, is contained.
—Susan Acret
