LEE UFAN | With Winds

signed in English and dated 88; signed and titled in English and dated 1988.2.24 on the reverse

Acquired directly from the artist in 1988 through a special commision

Japan, Kyoto, Kyoto Museum of Contemporary Art, The Kahitsukan, The Contemporary Art 1988, November 1988

Dialogue with Wind
Lee Ufan

When I passively accept external winds, an even greater world is opened. -- Lee Ufan

A work whose presence blocks the viewer is violent […] I hope that the works occasioned by my finite thoughts and actions will make sculptural and painterly spaces, that heave and grow and conspire with the infinite, bloom. -- Lee Ufan

With Winds (Lot 1078) and From Winds (Lot 1079) are exhilarating masterpieces emblematic of Lee Ufan’s enlivening Winds era in the 1980s, which represented a major breakthrough in the Dansaekhwa master’s esteemed career. Following a four-year political exile from his country during which he was placed under close surveillance by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency in the late 1970s, Lee moved to Kamakura, Japan and developed a new painting approach that prominently disrupted the strict regimentation of his earlier From Line and From Point series. Abandoning his rigorously clinical serialisations, Lee’s brushstrokes became free flowing and multi-directional, exhibiting a burgeoning dynamism and dexterous calligraphic touch. Lee titled these new series From Winds (1982-1986) and With Winds (1987-1991), with ‘wind’ referring to an enlightened acceptance and heightened receptivity of the other. The artist once said: “when I passively accept external winds, an even greater world is opened” (Lee Ufan, exh. cat., Fondazione Mudima, Milano, 1994, p. 26).

Monumental and sublimely invigorating, created at the pinnacle of the With Winds era, With Winds is the largest painting from the celebrated series ever to appear at auction. The work exhibits a distinctive composition with a significant portion of white canvas, which signifies the artist’s gradual suppression of his ego, and exudes a euphoric vitality and charisma superlative of works from this period. Lee wrote in 1989, one year after creating the current lot: “How open the world, how suggestive […]! I want to enlarge and deepen the exchange with the exciting and stimulating outside world instead of soliloquizing and showing obedience to the dictatorship of expression” (Lee Ufan: With Winds – Bilder 1986-88/Paintings 1986-88, exh. cat., Galerie M. Bochum, Germany, 1989, p. 4). Silke von Berswordt-Wallrabe observes that although Lee opens himself up to external forces of nature, signalling a willingness to work in a less preconceived, cerebral way, “unlike the Surrealists with their (semi-)automatic practices, and unlike the Action painters, he relinquishes rational control not in order to give free rein to personal expression, but in order to make his painting receptive towards factors outside his own subjectivity” (Lee Ufan: Encounters with the Other, 2007, p. 137). Such a philosophical and aesthetic emancipation paved the way for Lee’s subsequent Correspondence series, whose return to austere brushwork displayed ever-heightening internal and external resonance.

From Winds, meanwhile, hails from the beginning of the preceding From Winds period and embodies Lee’s transitional phase into controlled yet organic intuitive spontaneity. While the composition is still regular, retaining somewhat of a system or structure, Lee’s regulated brushwork is sensitively balanced with gentle rhythms, with each mark representing an unpremeditated response to the preceding mark or marks. The artist has compared this procedure to a game of go: “Regulating my breath and feeling a rhythm in my body, I bring my brush down at a certain place on the canvas. After this I naturally want to move the brush to another place in response to the first mark. Then, inevitably, a different place calls to the brush. Like adding stones to the board in a game of go, a tension-filled situation is gradually created” (cited in Ibid., p. 142). Through a continuous interrogation of breath, the artist explores the notion of infinity; in his words, “My works are pictorial means to open a channel to the infinite. Through the reiteration of an idea in From Point and From Line, and the situational development of exchanges occurring between place and action in From Winds, I explore the motif of infinity” (cited in Lee Ufan, exh. cat. Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, 1991, n.p.).

Lee’s epochal Winds decade marked an era in which the distinguished artist-cum-philosopher gained indisputable international prominence. Numerous important museum exhibitions featured Lee’s works, including Japon des avant-gardes 1910-1970 at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1986, which coincided with a display of Lee’s watercolors and drawings in the museum’s permanent collection galleries. In 1988, Lee’s works featured in Monoha: La scuola delle cose at the Museo Laboratorio di Arte Contemporanea in Rome, whose catalogue published the first Italian translation of Lee’s seminal essay In Search of Encounter. In the same year Lee held acclaimed solo exhibitions across Japan and Europe; most notably, the catalogue for Ex Oriente at Milan’s Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea included a laudatory essay by eminent French critic Pierre Restany. Also in 1988, Lee, whose own scholarly writings are grounded in transnational philosophical inquiries including that of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger, etc., published an essay collection entitled Toki no furue ("The Trembling of Time").

Since then, the Dansaekhwa master has become the subject of major exhibitions at world class institutions and platforms such as the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul (1994); the Venice Biennale (2007, 2011); and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Belgium (2009). In 2010 the Lee Ufan Museum opened at Benesse Art Site, Naoshima, Japan, and in 2011 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York presented Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity, which charted Lee's visual, conceptual, and theoretical terrain that has radically expanded the possibilities for painting and sculpture since the 1960s. In 2014, Lee became the fourth guest artist selected for the Palace of Versailles' prestigious contemporary art program and presented ten sculptural works in the palace's historic grounds. The critically lauded presentation cemented Lee's status as one of the greatest contemporary artists of our current generation.