Lee Ufan

Private Collection, Japan

One way of showing the idea of infinity in a picture is the repetition of pictorial elements.  As with living organisms, it is a repetition of birth and death, death and birth, yet it must be sequenced so that each moment is unique and separate.  The organic device where by each brushstroke, each element is independent and mutually related makes a picture full of force.
                                                       - Lee Ufan

Born in South Korea and a former student of Philosophy in Japan, Lee Ufan was a leading member of the 1960s Japanese Mono-Ha school.  This internationally acclaimed avant-garde movement placed Philosophy at the core of their concern, rejecting personal experience as primary to artistic expression.  In a press statement released from the Tate Gallery upon their 1998 acquisition of two works by Ufan, they state: "[The Mona-Ha group] sought instead to minimize expression and to focus instead on the observed reality of the work of art and on the internal relations of its parts.”

From Point and From Line series, begun in 1971, are among the strongest bodies of work in Ufan’s oeuvre.  Drawing his brush down through pigment suspended in viscous glue until the color fades away, Ufan creates a cascading effect of repeating lines and orbs, animating the canvas “as a pictorial enactment of the idea of infinity…It seems to me that each delineated brushstroke, each element, gradually becomes liberated from me, fully inhaling and exhaling space”.  (Lee Ufan quoted Ibid.)