- 1131
LEE UFAN | With Winds
Estimate
5,500,000 - 7,500,000 HKD
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Description
- Ufan Lee
- With Winds
- oil and mineral pigment on canvas
- 182 by 227.5 cm. 71⅝ by 89½ in.
signed and dated 87
Provenance
Artist
Private Collection, Japan
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Private Collection, Japan
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Catalogue Note
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 is an exhilarating piece 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 exudes a euphoric vitality and charisma superlative of works from this period. Lee wrote in 1989: “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.
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.
Lee Ufan
With Winds is an exhilarating piece 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 exudes a euphoric vitality and charisma superlative of works from this period. Lee wrote in 1989: “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.
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.