Guggenheim exhibition explores sense of infinity via dots, lines

By Kwon Mee-yoo

한국의 이우환이 뉴욕 구겐하임 미술관에서  지난 금요일 부터 회고전이 열렸다.이 전시는 그의 뛰어난 예술철학과  북미의 포스트 모던이즘 미술세계를 소개하고있다.그의 작품은 정방형의 철판과 선, 점을 이용한 단순성의 무한한 감성을 확대하고 있으며....그는 중국의Cai Guo-Qiang 그리고 백남준에 이어 아시아 작가로는 세번째로 격조있는 이 미술관에서 회고전이 열리고 있는 것이다. 

 Korean artist Lee U-fan’s retrospective “Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York opened Friday.

The exhibition introduces the prominent artist-philosopher and his post-Minimalistic artistic world to North America. Lee’s artworks expand the sense of infinity by simply using dots, lines, square steel plates and round stones.

Lee is only the third Asian artist to have a retrospective at the prestigious museum, following the late Korean video artist Paik Nam-june (1932-2006) and Chinese contemporary artist Cai Guo-Qiang.

“Lee U-fan is an artist of extraordinary creative vision. Admired, even revered, abroad, Lee is surprisingly little known in North America, and this late-career survey, which we offer to the public as part of the Guggenheim’s Asian Art Initiative, is overdue,” Richard Armstrong, director of the Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, said in a press release.

Some 90 works by Lee, ranging from paintings and sculpture to a new site-specific installation, are exhibited throughout the famed Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda floor and ramps and two Annex Levels of the Guggenheim.

This first North American retrospective for Lee features his most iconic works spanning from the 1960s to the present — painting series “From Point” and “From Line” (1972-84), “Winds” (1982-86), “With Winds” (1987-91), “Correspondence” (1991-2006), “Dialogue” (2006-) and sculptural series “Relatum” (1968-).

Some of Lee’s early works are displayed on lower floors as an introduction to the exhibition. For the occasion the artist re-created “Phenomena and Perception B,” a 1969 sculpture composed of a large rock, a pane of glass and a sheet of rolled steel, which represents his Mono-ha period.

The exhibition continues chronologically and thematically.

The “From Point” and “From Line” series gives a sense of temporal infinitude by dabbing dots or painting a vertical stroke on canvas using glue and mineral pigments.

Lee’s iconic “Relatum” sculptural works seek relationships between objects or events.

“A work of art, rather than being a self-complete, independent entity, is a resonant relationship with the outside,” Lee said in the press release. “It exists together with the world, simultaneously what is and what is not, that is, a ‘relatum.’”

His works were developed into the “From Winds” and “With Winds” series in the 1980s. The artist’s free and dynamic brushstrokes activate what he calls “the living composition of empty spaces.”

Lee painted three large brushstrokes directly on the three walls of a small gallery on Annex Level Seven, creating a site-specific artwork for the Guggenheim titled “Dialogue—space,” as a part of his recent “Dialogue” series. The brushstrokes of oil paint mixed with mineral pigments enliven the emptiness of the space, creating what Lee calls “an open site of power in which things and space interact vividly.”

Lee was born in Haman, South Gyeongsang Province and studied painting at the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University and philosophy at Nihon University, Tokyo.

He is a focal figure of Japan’s first contemporary art movement Mono-ha. The Mono-ha school leaves an object as it is and approaches the space, situations and relationships, ignited by Lee’s seminal writings from the late 1960s to the early 1970s.

The artist-philosopher established a studio in Paris and has been dividing his time between Japan and Europe since then. Lee is also a renowned writer of 17 books, including “The Art of Encounter” (2007), an anthology in English.

출처: 코리아 타임지
The exhibition runs through Sept. 28. For more information visit www.guggenheim.org.