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Meet the artist: Lee Ufan
To coincide with the reopening of Lee Ufan's London exhibition, Response (until 22 January), we are spotlighting a short film about the artist made by Art Basel and Nowness last year.
Few artists can convey infinity in a brushstroke or tease presence from the void. The source of Korean artist Lee Ufan's creativity stems from childhood where he was raised with strict Confucian ideals and schooled in poetry and calligraphy. In the early Sixties, having moved to Japan to study philosophy at Nihon University, he emerged from a creative milieu as a leader in the Mono-ha (“School of Things”) movement; an aesthetic theory that rejected Western modern art. The movement also explored the properties of natural and industrial materials to show their dismay at the rampant industrialization of Japan.
This episode of Meet the artists by Art Basel visits the 84-year-old master in his studio in Kamakura, Japan. This film serves as a blueprint to understanding Ufan's ascetic minimalism and how his semicentennial survey of materials led to a uniquely philosophical approach to art. Click thorugh below to see the film in full.