Playing with emptiness and fullness for fifty years, the minimalist works of the Korean artist bring space and materials into resonance. To "inhabit time" and make silence resonate.
Following his work in the gardens of Versailles in 2014, the master has now taken over the fascinating Alyscamps necropolis in Arles, choosing, at 85, to compose a "Requiem" there. Accompanying the sarcophagi lined up at the entrance to this city of the dead, the elegant austerity of the artist's Relatum series takes on a funereal tone. Combining distinct and often dissonant elements—the encounter of a stone and its reflection in a mirror placed on a white square in a garden, or that of two stones and a long metal plate unfurled like a shimmering carpet along the sepulchers—Lee Ufan's Relatum series are not, for their creator, finished works in themselves, but rather mediums.
Far from being an artifact, sculpture is for Lee Ufan the means of relating individuals and their environment, the body and a given space, the inner world and the outer world… For this great master of emptiness, co-founder of the Mono-ha (school of things) movement in Tokyo in 1969, which advocates the effacement of the artist, minimal intervention in the use of raw materials, this artistic discipline consists of creating a poetic space intended to arouse an “aesthetic emotion” through the play of oppositions, an “art of resonance […] capable of revealing the silence and emptiness” of unoccupied spaces.
“Connecting the artwork to space means opening it up, entering into a relationship with the infinite,” the artist told us during a visit to his Parisian studio. He added: “For me, sculpture is a relationship with space. […] I seek to open a dialogue with nature, to create an encounter between the elements and the viewer.”
Sculpture is about inhabiting space, and even more, about making space and matter interpenetrate, letting the void inhabit the work – so that we may inhabit it… Like Fontana, who “by tearing the canvas, introduced the notion of infinity into the painting”, Lee Ufan thus makes the void the place of all possibilities, a space in tension born “from the shifts and correspondences between materials and places” – offered to our imagination stimulated “by this ambivalence between appearance and disappearance, between presence and absence”.
"Requiem" Exhibition – Alyscamps Necropolis
Avenue des Alyscamps, Arles
Until the end of September 2022
Lee Ufan – Requiem, exhibition catalogue edited by Alfred Pacquement
Actes Sud, 2022
25 €
Coming soon (spring 2022): “Lee Ufan” Exhibition – Hotel Vernon
Stéphanie Dulout
