LEE UFAN

Charcoal and watercolor works on paper from the late 1970s to the early 1980s echo his representative works from that period, namely From Line and From Point, which convey the passage of time through traces of repeated gestures. Meanwhile, turbulent brushstrokes seen in these works foreshadow the dynamic development of the subsequent From Winds and With Winds series. In works from the late 1980s, restrained brushwork brought increasing prominence to the blank areas. Since the 2000s, the focus has shifted to the resonance between a few brushstrokes and the expanse of unpainted space surrounding them. In these drawings, if the act of mark-making enacts the artist’s own subjectivism, the blank space may be said to suggest an objective world beyond the self. At the same time, the artist emancipates materials such as paint and charcoal as well as paper, which serves as their support, from the realm of representation and meaning in traditional art, foregrounding their relationships as things in and of themselves. These various interrelationships extend beyond the picture plane, opening up to the exhibition space and the viewer.

This worldview—that everything is interconnected—underlies Lee’s sculptures as well. Relatum is a series of three-dimensional works in which natural and artificial materials are situated together in space while keeping the artist’s arbitrary expression to a minimum. The three pieces on view at the gallery each combine stone and varying shapes of iron. Stone is a material that existed before humankind and recalls nature and the cosmos, whereas iron, produced from stone, recurs throughout Lee’s oeuvre as a symbol of the artificial and the modern. Stainless steel rods curved to correspond with the forms of two stones in one work, and an iron plate whose dented edge faces a stone in another, evoke invisible forces at work between the materials. Through these bodies of work, Lee raises an inquiry into the encounter between thing and thing, thing and human being, and thing and place.