Lee Ufan retrospective ‘Inhabiting Time’ opens at Centre Pompidou Metz
28 February 2019
Centre Pompidou Metz has opened a retrospective exhibition on the work of Lee Ufan. ‘Inhabiting Time’ traces the progression of main themes that have informed Ufan’s work from the 1960s to the present. Rather than provide a chronological survey of his career, the exhibition aims to highlight how the artist’s relationship with painted/ unpainted and occupied/ empty space has continued to develop as the focus of his practice over several decades.As part of Japan's Mono-ha ('School of Things') movement, Lee Ufan strove for a new definition of art that rejected Western notions of representation, focusing on the relationships of materials and perceptions. This resulted in a visual communication that by-passed both language and figurative representation, instead using sensitive interventions to provoke 'encounters' - for example between natural and industrial materials - as in his celebrated sculpture series Relatum. ‘Inhabiting Time’ offers a meditative pathway through the successive or parallel phases in Lee Ufan's career - the relationship between things and their surrounding space, forms and voids, but also the dialogue between action and non-action.
The exhibition ends with a meditation room, echoing the meditation cell installed by Lee Ufan as the conclusion of the visitor experience at his personal museum in Naoshima, Japan - allowing visitors to prolong their visit through reflection and recollection. Complementing and expanding on the exhibition, composer Ryuichi Sakamoto has created a soundtrack in response to the essential materials, poetry and philosophy of Lee Ufan's work.
Image: Lee Ufan, Watercolour painting on stones, 1998, Hakone Valley. © Lee Ufan
