THE PHOTOS SEEM MORE INTERESTING THAT THE REAL THING


For our annual visit tot Versailles, Anne and I went off to see the South Korean artist Lee Ufan. I knew nothing about him and as usual did not do too much research on Internet before we went. I’d looked at a few of the photos in the gardens and left it at that. The Beaux Arts article had been very philosophical and I have to say, there was no real enthusiasm or excitement about our day out.

To begin with the crowds were horrendous.

As Anne now has an Icom card as well, there was no waiting and it was perhaps not interesting enough to see the one sculpture inside the Castle. 

I had read about his « Arch » in front of the chateau, that from a certain point it disappeared completely from view. Something to do with light and the material used. The picture on Internet shows it in all its glory - and no, we did not have that pleasure.






Just a little about him…..

Born in 1936 in a mountain village in South Korea, Lee Ufan was first initiated to traditional Chinese culture. His training, anchored in Far-Eastern tradition initially led him to literature and writing. After moving to Japan at the age of 20, he studied philosophy and engaged in political action for the reunification of the two Koreas. At the same time, he started his career as an artist, taking an interest in Jackson Pollock’s gestural abstraction, while at the same time studying traditional Japanese painting.

His activity as a critic and a theorist was noted as were his artistic experiments, when he became one of the members of the Mono-Ha artistic movement, a term which could be translated as “the School of Things”. According to Lee Ufan’s definition, as the founder and theorist of this group of Japanese artists, Mono Ha’s principle was to use a thing without adding anything to it. They took and assembled industrial materials, daily objects, natural objects, without modifying them. This method did not consist in using objects and space to embody an idea but came from the wish to let diverse elements live through the relationships they have between themselves. Mono-Ha appeared at the same time as the European and North-American trends grouped in Arte Povera, Supports-Surfaces or Land Art movements, all ways of rethinking the very basis of sculpture and painting. Mono-Ha is in many ways their equivalent in another geographical and cultural background and has many common features with these other artists in both free use of materials and formal reduction.
Relatum - Shadow of the Stars Lee Ufan’s sculptures most often confront two materials: steel plates and natural stones. Their generic name “Relatum”, expresses the notion that a work of art is not an autonomous and independent entity, but that it only exists in its relation to the outside world. For Lee Ufan, the action of the sculptor consists in criticizing the hyper-productivity of the modern world, in response to the evolution of art, which after thousands of year spent making hand-made objects, moved to industrial objects and ready-made. Lee Ufan has chosen to connect the made and the unmade. In his mind, “seeing, choosing, borrowing or moving are already a part of the creative act”. He links nature to human conscience with a simple iron sheet dialoging with a stone. He can also deploy mat steel sheets in a linear structure, standing or prone, their undulations responding to the space they occupy.
(text on their home page)


This morning before writing this text, I studied each one of the photos of his work, and frankly despite my first impressions which usually do not let me down, his work as photographed is quite beautiful. Something magical about it. These large stones on or next to steel plates which reflect the light. I’m not displeased with the photos I took as we were in that area alone - as we had been last year for the Peone. Perhaps the work needs less space as the sculptures in many cases were not as visible as all that. Certainly the spectators were walking past them without stopping to look. Maybe we should have taken more time to see……




 The shadows from the stones were actually worked on the ground. Frankly quite spectaculor.





Somehow I think though, that these cloud formations are just as fascinating at those mystical stones.....






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