akive

Prominent Korean artist Lee U-fan, 75, will hold a retrospective exhibition titled “Lee U-fan: Making Infinity” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, from June 24 to Sept. 28.

Lee is the second Korean artist to hold an exhibition at one of the world’s most prestigious museums. The first was the late video artist Paik Nam-june in 2000.

The museum introduces the artist as a “preeminent sculptor, painter, and writer active in Korea, Japan and Europe over the last forty years,” and continues “the exhibition positions Lee as a historical figure and contemporary master, charting the artist’s creation of a visual, conceptual, and theoretical language that has radically expanded the possibilities for Post-Minimalist art.”

The exhibition will feature some 90 works from the 1960s to the present including a new site-specific installation.

Installed throughout the museum from the rotunda floor and the six ramps of the Frank Lloyd Wright designed building and into two Annex Level galleries the exhibit is sure to attract much attention. Many of the sculptures, paintings, works on paper, and installations will be presented in the U.S. for the first time.

Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, said, “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.”

Born in Haman, South Gyeongsang Province, Korea in 1936, Lee witnessed historical vicissitudes from the Japanese occupation (1910-1945) to the Korean War (1950-53). He studied painting at the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University and moved to Japan in 1956, where he earned a degree in philosophy from Nihon University, Tokyo, focusing on phenomenology and structuralism. Lee is also a renowned writer of 17 books, including the English-language anthology “The Art of Encounter” (2007).