Lee Ufan
Lee Ufan, 'Relatum' (1968)
'In November 1968 (Nobuo) Sekine met the Korean-born artist Lee Ufan (b. 1936), who was soon to be of central importance to Mono-ha and the articulation of its ideas. Lee had studied ‘Asian thought’, including the philosophy of Laozi and Zhuangzi and after moving to Japan in 1956, had studied modern Western philosophy at Nihon University. Lee recognised the progressiveness of Sekine’s ideas and admired his work, whilst Sekine found in Lee a theoretician to support his artistic practice and views of art.
Lee, in a similar way to Sekine, took natural materials such as stone, glass, rubber, iron plates and cotton and presented them in juxtaposition, so as to reveal the physical materiality of the work and allow the materials to establish their own relations independent of artistic intervention. Lee’s work Phenomenon and Perception B (1968), the title of which he later changed to Relatum consists of a sheet of glass that has cracked under the weight of the large stone block placed on top of it. About this work, he explained:
“If a heavy stone happens to hit glass, the glass breaks. That happens as a matter of course. But if an artist’s ability to act as a mediator is weak, there will be no more to see than a trivial physical accident. Then again, if the breakage conforms too closely to the intention of the artist, the result will be dull. It will also be devoid of interest if the mediation of the artist is haphazard. Something has to come out of the relationship of tension represented by the artist, the glass, and the stone. It is only when a fissure results from the cross-permeation of the three elements in this triangular relationship that, for the first time, the glass becomes an object of art.”'
