Lee Ufan

In 2024, almost 50 years since his work was presented at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in the 1976 Biennale of Sydney, Lee Ufan returns to Sydney. Within spaces designed by the artist, this new exhibition distils over six decades of considered experimentation into a series of new paintings and sculptures created especially for the Art Gallery.

Lee’s sparing use of simple materials, including stone, steel and canvas, has a quiet force that encourages contemplation and consideration of the physical and intellectual self in relation to the work. He is also a writer whose philosophical approach to art embraces Zen and Confucian thought, alongside aesthetic ideas of emptiness, known as ma.  

For Lee, the space around objects is as significant as the objects themselves. His conceptual and minimalist approach has been influential in art, design and philosophy, with artists Anish Kapoor and Park Seo-Bo as well as architect Tadao Ando among the prominent figures inspired by his art. 

Born in Korea in 1936, Lee lives between Japan and France. In the 1960s he was a founder of Japan’s Mono-ha (object school) movement, which emphasised relationships between natural and industrial materials, and between objects and their viewers. He was also associated with the Dansaekhwa monochrome movement that emerged in Korea in the 1950s as part of a search for a universal aesthetic that was separate from tradition and without nationalist associations. 

This first Sydney exhibition of work by Lee follows recent exhibitions of his work at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin, National Art Center in Tokyo, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, Centre Pompidou-Metz, Gwangju Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.