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Lot Essay
‘Each moment occurs only once, but because everything is a continuation of single moments, it is necessary for them to repeat and resonate with each other.’
—LEE UFAN
With its three gracefully composed grey brushstrokes, Correspondance (1993) by Lee Ufan exudes a stately and meditative calm. Part of a series of the same name spanning over two decades, the work shares in the overall series’ feeling of slow gestation, its minimalistic marks imbued with a thoughtful, measured tranquillity. Lee’s methodology is simple, coating a large brush with a mixture of oil paint and an unusual dissolved mineral pigment before carefully applying a number of evenly-sized brushstrokes around the canvas. The result however is extremely powerful: the mineral pigment supplying the paint with a flinty radiance, the paint ebbs across each brushstroke, thickening and thinning at its edges, while the expansive white ground of the canvas seems to swell in the vacuum between the marks.
While recalling Robert Ryman or Robert Morris’ blindfolded drawings, Lee’s work hybridises those artists’ Western Minimimalism with a painterly interest in the properties of the brushstroke stemming from the Mono-ha avant-garde collective he co-founded during the 1960s. Meaning ‘School of Things’, and influenced as much by Heidegger and Foucault as the traditional academic practices of Korean and Japanese art, Mono-ha rejected expressionism for a more focused exploration of materiality, an attentiveness to the formal qualities of artistic material that had affinities with the work being done by their contemporaries in the Italian Arte Povera movement. Together, these concerns meet in Correspondance to produce a work of rich intellectual complexity. On the one hand it is a compositional study that functions as an autonomous formal arrangement, asking the viewer only to consider the serene spatial relationships of the marks on the canvas. But its lucid presentation of the brushstroke also has a gestural quality that conveys a sense of artistic process – only instead of expressing an artistic subjectivity, the feeling is of a quietly repetitive ritualism, imbuing its Minimalism with a transcendental quality.
—LEE UFAN
With its three gracefully composed grey brushstrokes, Correspondance (1993) by Lee Ufan exudes a stately and meditative calm. Part of a series of the same name spanning over two decades, the work shares in the overall series’ feeling of slow gestation, its minimalistic marks imbued with a thoughtful, measured tranquillity. Lee’s methodology is simple, coating a large brush with a mixture of oil paint and an unusual dissolved mineral pigment before carefully applying a number of evenly-sized brushstrokes around the canvas. The result however is extremely powerful: the mineral pigment supplying the paint with a flinty radiance, the paint ebbs across each brushstroke, thickening and thinning at its edges, while the expansive white ground of the canvas seems to swell in the vacuum between the marks.
While recalling Robert Ryman or Robert Morris’ blindfolded drawings, Lee’s work hybridises those artists’ Western Minimimalism with a painterly interest in the properties of the brushstroke stemming from the Mono-ha avant-garde collective he co-founded during the 1960s. Meaning ‘School of Things’, and influenced as much by Heidegger and Foucault as the traditional academic practices of Korean and Japanese art, Mono-ha rejected expressionism for a more focused exploration of materiality, an attentiveness to the formal qualities of artistic material that had affinities with the work being done by their contemporaries in the Italian Arte Povera movement. Together, these concerns meet in Correspondance to produce a work of rich intellectual complexity. On the one hand it is a compositional study that functions as an autonomous formal arrangement, asking the viewer only to consider the serene spatial relationships of the marks on the canvas. But its lucid presentation of the brushstroke also has a gestural quality that conveys a sense of artistic process – only instead of expressing an artistic subjectivity, the feeling is of a quietly repetitive ritualism, imbuing its Minimalism with a transcendental quality.