Lee Ufan

The volume accompanies the first complete retrospective of the painter and sculptor Lee Ufan in Germany, set up at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Lee is considered one of the most important representatives of the Mono-ha school in Japan - a movement whose artists particularly focused for their work on the combination of raw materials such as stones, branches or earth with industrial materials such as steel or glass - and of the Dansaekhwa movement in Korea - in which Korean artists began to explore abstraction and materiality in the mid-1970s, especially through monochrome painting.

Lee Ufan has exhibited around 50 works from the last five decades at Berlin's most important museum space dedicated to contemporary art. The dialogue between the very famous Self-portrait with a velvet cap by Rembrandt, hosted at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, with Lee's vast installation Relatum - The road of mirrors finds a particular space in the volume: an installation through which Lee introduces visitors to the artistic movements of Japan and Korea in the 1970s, as well as providing a new perspective on an iconic work of Western European art.