Now on view at the The National Art Center, Tokyo, a major retrospective of work by Lee Ufan includes the artist’s pre-Mono-ha pieces alongside more recent sculptures.

Translated to ‘School of Things’, Mono-ha was an artist group that originated in the 1960s with an anti-Modernist stance. Using natural and industrial materials, Mono-ha, which was founded by Lee Ufan alongside Nobuo Sekine, embraced the ephemeral, and many of their site-specific works were destroyed.

Lee Ufan later became associated with the Dansaekhwa movement, forming his minimalist paintings defined by serene, repetitive gestures, as a means of registering the body’s movement and the passage of time.

As Stephanie Bailey reflects in an article in Ocula Magazine chronicling Dansaekhwa’s legacy, the movement offered ‘a more mediated study into the tensions and possibilities from negotiating pure colour, form and material on canvas.’