"My intense touch across the canvas, coinciding with the untouched blank space, creates something bigger than myself, opening up new worlds of painting.”
V ibrating in the silence of the still canvas, a sweep of gradient red strikes the lower center of its pitch-white background. At once meditative, soulful, and passionate, the purportedly simple swipe of pigment imbues an enthralling energy that transcends pictorial confines, reaching a philosophical realm that intensifies through traces of the artist’s movement in the precise moment of its becoming. Such a distinct quality renders Lee Ufan’s 2021 Response a mature and refined development from his monumental 2006 Dialogue series, apropos of the Correspondence series from which the unique artistic language exuded from the present piece had been explored across three decades since its inception in 1991.
"These works have been created through a conversation between the canvas, brush and pigments of colour. I may start out with a concept or motif in mind but I am then influenced by externalities, and as a result, this expression is not about myself – it’s an interaction directed by multiple elements."
Anchoring the encounter among the quadrumvirate of painting – the brush, the medium, the canvas, and the artist, Response stands as an apt example of the Mono-ha movement, an avant-garde school of thought Lee majorly defined in the mid-1960s. In its apparent emptiness, Lee conducts the act of conscious reduction of representation, encapsulating the perceptions of void and presence with his entire being, body and soul. He lays above the canvas on a wooden board, landing the defining stroke only after long periods of fervent contemplation and mental focus. Amidst such intimate proximity between the creator and his creation, Lee establishes a complex discourse between the individual inner thought and the outer reality through the physicality and external elements he experiences in the process of making. Forfeiting the previous muted palette in this renewed series, the singular sweep of earthy red protrudes from the gesso, filling the space with a quiet ardence as the brush aligns with the artist’s very breath in the moment of contact.
“Experiencing the pandemic, I felt the breath of life and death in the same moment, and with this in mind, the meaning of life and death was opened up to another dimension for me.”
The 2019 pandemic opened up an extensive dialogue within the context of mortality across the globe, while ideas of the individual and the community became a conflicting social dilemma. In the wake of this, Lee developed a profound awareness towards the coexistence of life and death, in parallel to his role as an artist interacting with his art. Incorporating this dual consciousness in his works, Response finds itself a vessel of Lee’s reflection on his artistic identity and practice, his expressive process merging himself and the painting as one entity.
With an oeuvre stretching across seven decades, Lee Ufan’s career extends beyond his artistic innovations. As a cardinal force of Mono-ha, Lee’s artistic language was forged during a t.mes of global unrest and change, having witnessed the collapse of colonial powers and the rise anti-authoritarian culture in the late 20th century. While rejecting Western notions of representation, Lee returns to the idea of coexistence, inviting an overflow of sensation and emotions to the apparent blankness of his pieces. True to his poetic vision, Lee continues to reinvent the possibilities of minimal abstraction, cementing his position as a giant in contemporary art across Asia and beyond.