Lee Ufan has a secret house deep within the foundations of Arlesis a everlasting gallery lately opened by a Korean-born artist within the historic middle of the Provence metropolis. Listed below are two of Lee’s iconic work, every so small that they seem like big particular person brushstrokes. Nonetheless, upon nearer inspection, one realizes that they’re created via the affected person software of a number of layers of subtly modulated shade—every layer utilized on to the gallery flooring.
Gallery director Juliette Vignon explains that the underground exhibition can solely be visited by appointment. However it supplied a “focus” of six years of Lee’s undivided inventive consideration to a fortunate few. These works could appear easy, however they’re stuffed with philosophy, and their conception is immediately associated to the encompassing atmosphere. Vignon stated they completely captured the character of an artist who made stone the “protagonist” of his life’s work.
The affect of historical Arles
The traditional stones of Arles (a UNESCO World Heritage Web site for its Roman monuments) undoubtedly influenced Lee’s determination to open a basis right here in April 2022. So is the rising momentum across the small metropolis, the place Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin got here to color, as a vacation spot for modern artwork. Town is legendary amongst pictures lovers for the Arles Picture Competition, based in 1970, and in 2021 with the inauguration of Swiss collector Maja Hoffmann’s Luma Basis campus, a brand new artwork The middle was accomplished.
Hofmann grew up within the space as a toddler, whereas Lee knew Arles via his buddy Michel Enrici, the previous Meg Basis director and writer of Actes Sud. Lee stated the “first actual second of connection” got here in 2013 The Artwork Newspaper, when Enrici curated an exhibition of his work in a former church. Later, following the opening of the Lee Ufan Museum in Busan, South Korea, and Naoshima, Japan, the nation the place he has moved for the reason that age of 20, the artist envisioned “a brand new house devoted to my work within the western a part of the world.” .
The unique plan was to find the inspiration in New York, however the seek for an acceptable location there failed. In current many years, Lee’s “love and respect” for France – he had a studio in Paris for 30 years – helped elevate Arles as a substitute. Now he sees a serendipitous resonance between the Roman metropolis’s “particular connection to the previous and all time” and his long-time dwelling in Japan, the “historical” and “calm” coastal city of Kamakura. Moreover, he stated, Arles is “a spot the place outsiders can discover the suitable atmosphere.”
Discovering a spot on this planet has at all times been a leitmotif for Lee, who described his feeling of being a perpetual outsider in an essay from the early Nineteen Nineties. “Korean folks assume I am Japaneseized, Japanese folks assume I am Korean at coronary heart, and once I go to Europe, folks deal with me as an Oriental,” he wrote. “I see myself as a ping pong ball, the man within the center, at all times being pushed round and nobody desires to just accept me as an insider.”
Vignon stated Lee’s present dedication for the inspiration to be “self-funded and autonomous” displays his fierce independence in pursuing a worldwide inventive profession towards all odds. He moved to Tokyo after Japan colonized Korea, then one of many poorest international locations on this planet. Though he delved into philosophy and literature, the language barrier triggered him to desert his unique dream of turning into a author. By the late Sixties, he radicalized postwar Japanese artwork as a member of Monoha, a insurgent group towards Western modernism. “He at all times wished to make his personal decisions,” Vignon stated, “so it was vital to keep up that freedom. [in Arles]”.
Lee’s previous “reservations about museums,” he stated, have been associated to the “emphasis on sustaining a variable and fluid relationship with house” that he developed in his Seventies sculptural installations.That decade immersed him within the nomadic rhythms of the worldwide artwork world and was when he adopted the title reported In recognition of his three-dimensional works. This philosophical time period, denoting one entity in relation to a different, factors to the interconnectedness Lee sees between his sculptures, their environment, and their viewers.
Exact set up
“There is no such thing as a instruction handbook on how one can set up reported” stated Sam Bardaouil, co-director of Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, which is internet hosting a serious Lee Ufan retrospective (via April 28). Bardaouil stated Lee visited throughout a number of visits The house, and “lively participation within the association of the works,” dates again to the late Sixties.
In line with Vignon, Lee Ufan in Arles held the same dance on the eve of its opening. Lee collaborated with revered Japanese architect Tadao Ando to renovate the Hôtel Vernon, a Seventeenth-century mansion constructing. Vignon stated Lee was so strict concerning the site-specific set up of his works that he relocated a few of them on the final minute. “We’ve to rebuild some partitions,” she stated.
Japanese architect Tadao Ando creates show house in basis’s Seventeenth-century constructing
Picture: Frédéric Leclerc
The artist’s prerogative to coordinate the proper stress between sculpture and web site “might be a really fascinating problem for future generations,” Bardaoui stated. Now 87, Lee is fulfilling his need to “create a long-lasting legacy” and protect his work for “future generations” via a basis. House Arles, registered as a non-profit endowment in France, is in shut dialogue together with his studio over potential succession plans.
Nonetheless, Lee was adamant that it could not be “a mausoleum,” Vignon stated, however “a residing place the place new artists may very well be found or artists rediscovered via Lee Ufan’s eyes.” To this finish, Lee Ufan Arles has partnered with magnificence model Guerlain to launch the annual Artwork and Surroundings Award. The primary winner is French painter and printmaker Djabril Boukhenaïssi, at present residing in Arles and getting ready for a summer season exhibition within the gallery’s momentary house.
Subsequent up, fall exhibitions deliver discovery and rediscovery: curator Matthew Drutt focuses on early Twentieth-century Suprematism, impressed by two Malevich work from Lee’s personal assortment. The gathering is organically constructed and displays his big selection of pursuits, from Roman and Korean antiques to Matisse. Though Lee donated a group of Joseon Dynasty work and screens to the Musée Guimet in Paris in 2002, he has been cautious about his assortment. However now bringing the work to Arles offers one other approach to share his “inventive journey” with the general public.
Maybe, he stated, his artwork may very well be a “bridge” that invitations folks to replicate on “the intersection of cultures.” As a result of this meditative house in Arles is in the end about “common facets of human expertise.”
