Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
New York

This monumental retrospective of the Korean-Japanese conceptualist Lee Ufan, his first museum exhibition in the United States, capped a remarkable three years in the 75-year-old artist’s career. Though long revered in Korea and Japan, a recent string of solo shows at prestigious galleries and museums in Europe and the US has greatly raised Lee’s international profile. In June 2010, a purpose-built museum dedicated to his work opened on the Japanese island of Naoshima. Lee’s work, it seems, has finally nestled into the global postmodern landscape.

The soft curves of the spiraling rotunda in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim provided a level of reverential decorum. There, Lee’s works ascended in chronological order, revealing clear developments from one style to another. Displayed on the lower levels, the “From Point” series of paintings from the 1970s, with their horizontal lines of blue and orange paint daubs, set a gentle, repetitive rhythm that gradually devolved into the chaotic sweeps of blue and gray paint in his “With Winds” works of the 1980s.

An annex gallery and outdoor terrace were dedicated to Lee’s crucial early work with the Mono-ha movement. This loose collective of artists, based in Tokyo and most active between 1968 and 1972, began by exploring optical illusions and visual trickery in their paintings, sculptures and installations; later, inspired by the writings of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, they developed phenomenological “encounters” between natural and man-made materials, ranging from earth to water, stone, cotton, sponge and iron plates. Relatum (formerly Phenomenon A and Perception B, 1969/2011) consists of three large stones placed on top of a rubber strip marked with chalk to resemble a measuring tape. Stretched and buckled between the stones, the rubber demarcates the floor space with its physical presence as it warps the measuring system it mimics.

The upper floors of the rotunda revealed the progression of Lee’s Mono-ha work into his more recent sculptures and installations. The ephemerality of his practice was captured in Things and Words (1969), a photo documentation of three large sheets of paper that Lee left to drift in the wind outside the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum during the “9th Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan” in May 1969, and numerous other pieces re-created for this exhibition. The levity of this piece was subsequently echoed in Relatum – a signal (2005/2011), a tall stone leaning toward a square plate of steel placed flat on the floor; the corner of the steel sheet nearest the stone curls up as if caught by a gust of wind.

Though at first the placement of rock and metal seems undramatic, the longer one observes these quiet juxtapositions the more one feels a tension between them, an enigmatic sense of correspondence and reciprocity that invites a variety of metaphysical, animistic associations. Perhaps the “signal” alluded to in Relatum – a signal came from the stone, emitting unseen force to lift the steel. What is the “response” in Relatum – a response (2008/2011), in which a stone seems to have nibbled away at the sheet of metal placed in front of it? Did the two rocks in Relatum – expansion place (2008/2011) somehow bend the two curved steel plates that lie between them?

Such musings might seem fanciful, but the artist encourages them. Discussing Relatum – expansion place in an interview with ArtAsiaPacific in 2008, Lee said, “Compared to Japan, the air here [in New York] is very dry. In the humidity of Japan, the works look smaller, but here they expand and appear larger. The stones exert a pressure that creates an inflated look. It’s an illusion. When you look at the ocean horizon from a mountaintop, it looks round. And if you look at it from sea level, it looks straight. Both visions are real.”

The exhibition’s final room was an elegant fusion of Lee’s painting practice and the site-specific approach he employs in his sculptural work. Dialogue – space (2011) simply consisted of what appeared to be three large brushstrokes painted on three walls. The brushstrokes in this installation, as with similar works on canvas in the “Dialogue” series (2006– ), are in fact not single strokes but the result of repeated layerings of paint. Ending on this note of reverberating correspondence between three discrete elements, the show made it clear that Lee’s work always alludes to much more than the sum of its parts.