There’s a secret area deep within the foundations of Lee Ufan Arles, a everlasting gallery lately opened by the Korean-born artist within the historic coronary heart of the Provençal metropolis. Right here reside two of Lee’s signature work, every of that are so minimal that they seem as massive particular person brushstrokes. However, on nearer inspection, one realises they’re created by way of the affected person software of many layers of subtly modulated color—every utilized on to the gallery ground.
This underground show can solely be visited by appointment, explains the gallery’s director, Juliette Vignon. Nevertheless it provides the fortunate few “a focus” of the inventive considerations which have preoccupied Lee for six many years. The works are deceptively easy, but they’re philosophical, conceived in direct relation to their setting. They completely seize the disposition of an artist who has made stone the “major character” of his life’s work, Vignon says.
Historic Arles’s affect
The traditional stones of Arles—a Unesco World Heritage web site recognised for its Roman monuments—definitely influenced Lee’s choice to open his basis right here in April 2022. So did the rising momentum round this small metropolis, the place Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin as soon as got here to color, as a recent artwork vacation spot. Lengthy identified to pictures followers for the Rencontres d’Arles pageant, based in 1970, the town gained a brand new arts centre in 2021 with the completion of the Swiss collector Maja Hoffmann’s Luma Basis campus.
Whereas Hoffmann has childhood roots within the area, Lee obtained to know Arles by way of his pal, the previous Maeght Basis director Michel Enrici, and the publishers Actes Sud. “The primary actual second of connection” got here in 2013, Lee tells The Artwork Newspaper, when Enrici curated an exhibition of his works in a former chapel. Later, the artist imagined “a brand new area devoted to my works however situated within the Western a part of the world”, following the sooner openings of Lee Ufan museums in Busan, Korea, and Naoshima, Japan, his adopted nation for the reason that age of 20.
The unique plan was to base the inspiration in New York, however the seek for an acceptable web site there foundered. Lee’s “love and respect” for France in latest many years—he has stored a studio in Paris for 30 years—helped to raise Arles in its place. He now sees a serendipitous resonance between the Roman metropolis’s “particular hyperlink with the previous, and with time usually” and his long-term residence in Japan, the “historic” and “calm” coastal city of Kamakura. Furthermore, Arles is “a spot the place an outsider can discover a becoming milieu”, he says.
The seek for a spot on the earth has been a leitmotif for Lee, who described his sense of being a perpetual outsider in a textual content within the early Nineteen Nineties. “Koreans see me as being Japanised, the Japanese see me as being basically Korean, and after I go to Europe, folks set me apart as an Oriental,” he wrote. “I see myself as a ping-pong ball, the person within the center, at all times being pushed forwards and backwards with nobody prepared to just accept me as an insider.”
Lee’s current willpower for the inspiration to be “self-funded and autonomous” displays the fierce independence with which he has pursued a world artwork profession in opposition to the percentages, Vignon says. He migrated to Tokyo within the aftermath of Japan’s colonial rule of Korea, then one of many world’s poorest international locations. Although he studied philosophy and literature intensively, the language barrier led him to desert his first dream of turning into a author. By the late Sixties, he was radicalising post-war Japanese artwork as a member of Mono-ha, a collective of rebels working in opposition to Western Modernism. “He at all times wished to make his personal decisions,” Vignon says, “so it’s essential to maintain that freedom [in Arles].”
Lee had “reservations in the direction of museums” up to now, he says, linked to the “emphasis on sustaining a variable and fluid relationship with area” he developed in his sculptural installations in the course of the Nineteen Seventies. That was the last decade that introduced him into the nomadic rhythms of the worldwide artwork world and likewise when he adopted the title Relatum for his three-dimensional works. A time period from philosophy that denotes an entity that pertains to one other, it factors to the interconnections Lee sees between his sculptures, their environment and the viewer.
Exacting set up
“There is no such thing as a instruction guide for the way you put in a Relatum,” says Sam Bardaouil, the co-director of the Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin, which is staging a significant Lee Ufan retrospective (till 28 April). Lee scoped out the area over a number of visits and “actively engaged with the location of the work” going again to the late Sixties, Bardaouil says.
The same dance happened at Lee Ufan Arles within the run-up to opening, in line with Vignon. Lee collaborated with the revered Japanese architect Tadao Ando to refurbish the Seventeenth-century mansion constructing, the Hôtel Vernon. Lee was so exacting within the site-specific set up of works, Vignon says, that he relocated a few of them on the eleventh hour. “We needed to rebuild some partitions,” she says.
The Japanese architect Tadao Ando created show areas within the basis’s Seventeenth-century constructing
Photograph: Frederic Leclere
The artist’s prerogative to orchestrate the proper pressure between sculpture and web site is “going to be a really attention-grabbing problem in posterity”, Bardaouil suggests. Now aged 87, Lee is realising his want to “create a long-lasting legacy” and protect his works for “future generations” by way of the inspiration. The Arles area, registered in France as a nonprofit endowment fund, is in shut dialogue along with his studio over attainable succession plans.
Nevertheless, Lee is adamant it is not going to be “a mausoleum”, Vignon says, however “a residing place the place you may uncover new artists or rediscover artists by way of Lee Ufan’s eyes”. To this finish, Lee Ufan Arles has partnered with the wonder model Guerlain to launch the annual Artwork & Atmosphere Prize. Its first winner, the French painter and printmaker Djabril Boukhenaïssi, is at the moment in residency in Arles in preparation for a summer season exhibition on the gallery’s non permanent area.
Following that, the autumn present guarantees each discovery and rediscovery: the curator Matthew Drutt is specializing in early Twentieth-century Suprematism impressed by two Malevich drawings in Lee’s non-public assortment. Constructed organically, the gathering displays his wide-ranging pursuits, from Roman and Korean antiquities to Matisse. Although he donated a bunch of Joseon dynasty work and folding screens to the Musée Guimet in Paris in 2002, Lee has at all times been discreet about his accumulating. However bringing works to Arles now provides one other solution to share his “artistic journey” with the general public.
Maybe his artwork generally is a “bridge”, he says, an invite to mirror on “the intersections of cultures”.For this meditative area in Arles is, finally, about “the common points of human expertise”.
