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TThe island of Naoshima was heavily polluted and dominated by the Mitsubishi plant. Now, after being redeveloped by billionaire Sōichirō Fukutake in 1989, it is known as Japan’s “art island”. The island has a population of 3,000 and is located in the Seto Inland Sea. Designed by the architect Tadao Andō, this has a meditative, almost religious space and is filled with amazing paintings, sculptures and installations by artists from Claude Monet to landscape painter Walter De Maria, although the real Instagram bait is a large yellow and black pumpkin placed in the hole by Yayoi 194 Kusama.
As any retired American couple can attest, Naoshima has become the perfect destination for those who want to see things to the extreme. For many, this comes when they walk up to the beach and see a huge iron, 11m long and 13m wide, wedged between two sandstone rocks. At the bottom is a long metal plate that acts as a runway, inviting tourists to walk along the beach to the sea.
The sculpture – called Porte Vers l’Infini, or Gate to Infinity – seems to add to the beauty of its setting. The sky looks blue, the birds sing loudly, the mountains covered with pine trees are green and very impressive. As its creator, Korean-born artist Lee Ufan, says in his studio in the coastal city of Kamakura the next day: “I want my work to take you to a place where you can feel the deep breath of nature.”
The artist, who is affectionately known as “Mr Lee” by those close to him, will turn 90 next month. Also having two museums dedicated to him, one in Naoshima and the other in Arles, France, he is about to open two major exhibitions. In Venice, to coincide with the Biennale, he has a retrospective of his works from the late 1960s to the present. It will also include the original sculptures he created as part of the Mono-ha group. Mono-ha, which translates to School of Things, was interested in how things interact in nature. They are often compared to American artists, post-minimalists and the Italian school of arte povera, whose preferred materials were earth, stone and sand.
Lee said: “I was in my 30s. At that time, in the late 60s, America, Europe, and Japan were in a period of rebellion.” His first 3D work – called Phenomenon and Perception B but now, like his other sculptures, called Relatum – was a piece of glass that had been broken by the weight of a stone. It was in favor of Marcel Duchamp, an examination of the conflict between industry and nature. “In the beginning,” says Lee, “my work was not about being calm or quiet, but about violence and resistance.”
Lee didn’t always use heavy objects: in a 1969 book, then called Things and Words, Lee chased three large paper-shots in a courtyard overlooking the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum on a windy day. “I wanted to show how we talk about things,” says Lee. “After a while, the paper gets wrinkled and I get tired.” The work is named after Michel Foucault’s book Les Mots et les Choses, a philosophy that provides one of Lee’s inspirations. Did people understand what they wanted to do? “Maybe not.”
A day before its Venice exhibition opens, Dia Beacon in upstate New York will show eight works: three sculptures and five paintings, some from the 1970s series From the Line, in which straight lines are painted on the floor or across the canvas, fading as the dark blue oil paint fades. (Lee had to stop making these complex physical works in the 1980s when his hand began to shake too much.) Others come from the 90s series With Winds, in which the lines rotate.
Eight works may not seem like a lot on display, but there are only 17 in the entire Lee Ufan Museum in Naoshima – and it is forbidden to photograph their contents. Although she doesn’t consider herself a minimalist, Lee defies the idea of excess, both in art and in life, and is a master at putting things down. He once said: “I want viewers to notice the things I didn’t paint as well as the things I did.”
At Naoshima, the visitor’s experience ends in a room with a white vaulted ceiling and gray wooden floor. Shoes must be removed, so you are invited to sit and contemplate the three works on the wall, part of Lee’s Dialogue series. Each one has a gray color that ranges from light gray to a dark shade. Although it looks like one simple brush, it is made of small ones, built for a week, and each layer is allowed to dry before the next one is used. It is very calming to slow down and look at how the gray line breaks the white paint on the floor, and see how human care meets natural imperfections. “My work is very powerful,” said Lee.
The next day, I and three other reporters took a train to Kamakura, an hour from Tokyo, and then a bus to Lee’s studio. It’s taking longer than expected, meaning we’re at risk of being delayed by a few minutes. Lee’s studio manager starts running up the hill and encourages us to do the same. It is unclear whether this is due to the Japanese habit of delay, or because Mr Lee hates it. But he greets us warmly as he walks out the door and into the rock garden where he has placed many of his sculptures – including a bent metal one next to a stone.
Lee is wearing jeans, black leather slippers and rust colored knits under a gray cardigan. He doesn’t look anywhere near his full height. “I just work hard,” says Lee when I ask him the secret of his childhood. “I call myself a nomad – I travel a lot, visit many places and meet many people. I still don’t understand the world and I want to know more. This gives me the strength to stay young.”
She wakes up at 7am every day, walks for an hour, goes shopping for fresh vegetables and gets acupuncture done. When he wants to start painting, he exercises to get into the zone. “I always spend 10 to 15 minutes controlling my breathing, and then I try to be quiet, calm down.
Before the questions are asked, Lee settles everyone down with tea, served in cups and saucers featuring his signature brush. The studio has brushes of every size imaginable, and there are shelves full of art books including Richard Serra, Jasper Johns and the art movement. Lee’s From Line artwork hangs on the walls – and in the loo. I am with the translator and one of the artist’s three daughters. Later, he rudely says that he hasn’t always been a great husband and father. He said: “I think my family had to sacrifice some things to get a job. “I always talk about connecting with nature and through this, connecting with art. But then, in a way, I’m selfish, so there’s an irony in that.”
Lee was born in Kyongsang-namdo, a mountain village in Korea in 1936, when the country was occupied by the Japanese – an occupation that ended when Japan was defeated in World War II, although a civil war followed, leading to the country’s division. As a child, Lee excelled in poetry, art, literature and music, studying for the finals at a university in Seoul, aspiring to become a poet.
At the age of 20, he was asked to take medicine for his uncle who lived in Japan, and stayed to study philosophy at Nihon University in Tokyo. He began to create art that, he says, was strongly criticized from the word go, so he also became a critic: “I started writing as a way to protect myself.” Amazed by a work called Phase: Mother Earth by Nobuo Sekine, which showed an 8ft-long earth in Kobe’s Simu Rikyu Park next to an 8ft-deep hole that had been dug, he contacted Mono-ha. Besides his art, he wrote 17 books on philosophy, poetry and history.
His international reputation grew, but in 1970 the organizers of a festival of Japanese art in New York banned him because he was born in Korea, reflecting the long-standing animosity between the two countries. Lee said: “I was a little disappointed. But I felt the need to find ways to communicate with people in different positions.” Today he appreciates his world-class status, not closed by borders: a Korean in Japan, who speaks several languages and has an apartment in Paris.
People will be surprised by the choice of his stones, their careful placement on the floor, the amazing qualities of the large concrete tree displayed on the bed of stones at the entrance of the museum. Despite this, he has an undeniable power, which acts as a way to think critically. Lee says her work reflects something about internal and external relationships, the awareness of our bodies in nature, and finding our essential selves within the loud noise. “My work is always related to something,” he said. “Being comfortable with others is very important.”
