Lee Ufan

Lee Ufan’s (born 1936, in Kyongnam, South Korea) practice is grounded in questions of simplicity and the act of embedding a philosophy within an artwork. Painter, sculptor, writer and philosopher, Ufan came to prominence in the late 1960s as one of the major theoretical and practical proponents of the avant-garde Mono-ha (Object School) group. The Mono-ha school of thought was Japan’s first contemporary art movement to gain international recognition. It rejected Western notions of representation by focusing on the relationships between materials and perceptions rather than on expression or intervention. The artists of Mono-ha present works made of raw physical materials that have barely been manipulated.