“Something happens in the clash between the painted and the unpainted.” South Korean artist Lee Ufan offers a poetic and philosophical account of his life and work. This interview explores how nature, time, and silence inform Ufan’s meditative approach to painting and sculpture.
Lee Ufan recalls a formative experience from his early childhood, when a visiting poet and calligrapher made a single brushstroke on a blank sheet of paper. “Something appeared and spread out,” Ufan says. “This was surprising to me as a child. And this experience still surprises me when I paint.” Such moments of emergence continue to define his art. In his later paintings, Ufan often applies just a few brushstrokes to large expanses of blank canvas. “Something happens in the clash between the painted and the unpainted,” he explains. “When the painted and the unpainted clash, something occurs… Like a vibration, a wave, a kind of power.”
Ufan rose to prominence in the late 1960s as a key figure in Japan’s Mono-ha (School of Things) movement, which rejected traditional notions of representation and embraced the raw, often unmanipulated materials of the natural and industrial world. “It was a period of vigorous negation,” he says. “Instead of continuing to create, they pressed pause… and then started over from that.” Throughout the interview, Ufan emphasizes the spiritual and temporal dimensions of art: “The everyday world is full of surprises. You can draw out these surprises and work on them, not only for your own sake, but to communicate them to others.” In his own words, art is not an assertion of ego, but a means of encounter: “To me, this is what art is about. Having an encounter or an experience, you transform it in your own way. You redefine it and attempt to recreate it.”
Lee Ufan (b. 1936, Haman, South Korea) is a painter, sculptor, writer, and philosopher known for his foundational role in the Mono-ha movement in Japan and for his minimalist approach to material and gesture. After studying in Seoul and Tokyo, he gained international recognition through major exhibitions including the Biennale de Paris (1971), Documenta, and the Venice Biennale. He has held solo retrospectives at institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Centre Pompidou-Metz in France. His dedicated museums include the Lee Ufan Museum in Naoshima, Japan, and a permanent exhibition space at the Hôtel Vernon in Arles, France. Lee lives and works between Japan, South Korea, and France.
