Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity

In 1970 we filmed with amazingly and diversely talented group of emerging artists in Tokyo, one of which was Lee Ufan (b. 1936, Korea). The film “JAPAN: The New Art” accompanied an exhibition at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 1971. A recent retrospective exhibition, again at the Guggenheim, offered an opportunity to reconnect with the artist and to see his remarkable accomplishments over the past 40 years. We joined Lee Ufan, curator Alexandra Munroe and assistant Mika Yoshitake on a visit to his exhibition.

This first North American museum retrospective of artist-philosopher, Marking Infinity charts Lee’s creation of a visual, conceptual, and theoretical language that has radically expanded the possibilities for sculpture and painting. Deeply versed in modern philosophy, Lee is an influential writer on aesthetics and contemporary art and is recognized as the key theorist of Mono-ha, an antiformalist, materials-based art movement that developed in Tokyo in the late 1960s. Active internationally over the last forty years, Lee is acclaimed for an innovative body of Post-Minimalist work that promotes process and the experiential engagement of viewer and site. He emphasizes the bare existence of what is actually before us, to focus on what he calls “the world as it is.”