Currently based in Tokyo and Paris, artist-philosopher Lee Ufan was born in Korea in 1936. He studied painting at the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University and philosophy at Nihon University in Tokyo. Lee rose to prominence in the late 1960s as the leading theorist and practitioner of Mono-ha, a Japanese art movement that grew out of the antiauthoritarian and anticolonialist tumult of the period and emphasized the use of raw physical materials left to scatter, lean, drop, or break according to their situation. Applying the theories of structuralism, phenomenology, and Asian metaphysics in dialogue with international Post-Minimalist practices, he developed a radical artistic language revolving around the notion of encounter—seeing the bare existence of what is actually before us and focusing on “the world as it is.”

In the early 1970s Lee received significant attention at Tokyo’s leading galleries and museums and began exhibiting in Germany and France, including at the 1971 Paris Youth Biennale, which introduced Mono-ha to Europe and led him to establish a studio in Paris that year. As his work gained recognition in Europe, his monochromatic, repetitive gestural paintings garnered critical acclaim in Tokyo and especially in Seoul, where he became a seminal figure in the tansaekhwa (Korean monochrome) school. Lee has matched his artistic output with a prodigious body of critical writings and is the author of 17 books, including the English-language anthology The Art of Encounter (2007).

Lee has been the subject of major exhibitions at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels (2009); the Yokohama Museum of Art (2005); the Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne Métropole (2005); the Samsung Museum of Modern Art, Seoul (2003); Kunstmuseum Bonn (2001); the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris (1997); and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul (1994), as well as the solo exhibition Lee Ufan: Resonance at the 2007 Venice Biennale. He was awarded the Praemium Imperiale for painting in 2001 and the UNESCO Prize in 2000. During the 1990s, Lee was a visiting professor at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and he served as professor of art at Tama Art University in Tokyo from 1973 to 2007. In 2010 the Lee Ufan Museum, designed by Tadao Ando, opened at Benesse Art Site, Naoshima, Japan. In 2011, Lee’s work will be featured in two exhibitions at the Venice Biennale. Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity represents the artist’s first major U.S. retrospective.