LEE UFAN

" Showing the world as it is, without making it the object of an act of representation that opposes it to man. "

 

Lee Ufan is one of the most influential contemporary Korean artists on the international scene. If formally his work appears multiple (installation, sculpture, painting), it responds on the other hand to universal concerns. In his sculpture, Lee Ufan puts in relation antagonistic elements. He confronts natural materials (wood, stones, cotton) with industrial materials (metal, glass, mirrors) and plays with the notions of emptiness, space, and energy. Through the balance of their contrast, the elements reveal their shape, their mass, their relationship with the surrounding space. While he favors immobility in his sculptures, Lee Ufan, on the other hand, chooses in his paintings to reveal the gesture. His brushstrokes, reduced to a point and a line, tend towards the repetition of a single sign. Lee Ufan seeks to make each key more precise, firmer, more accurate and it is this difference between the keys that create the variation. Regarding his style which deals with matter and space, he declares that "the job is never finished because perfection or completeness does not exist".