On my recent trip to New York, I spent my days stomping through the major museums, galleries & under the radar exhibitions until I felt the effects of sensory overload. The long, bumpy subway ride back to the bowels of Brooklyn was spent nursing my visual aids (sleeping), often with me ending up at Rockaway Beach rather than Bed-Stuy.
It’s easy to be exhausted by visual material in a city saturated by art and sometimes difficult to reflect on what you’ve seen because you’re still digesting the poignancy of previous works. I didn’t get to the Guggenheim until the end of my trip and I don’t think I went in with the best attitude towards seeing art that day either after just narrowly avoiding my death on Madison Ave. Inspired by the pro New York jay-walkers…I figured I was seasoned enough to have a go solo. Wrong. I was charged at by an army of gypsy cabs and in the blinding haze of yellow cab cavalry - I was touched by death. Slight exaggeration but it was unsettling nonetheless.
Despite my trauma, I was enthused by the prospect of seeing Lee Ufan’s first US retrospective ‘Marking Infinity’. If you don’t know…Lee Ufan is a Korean born artist/philosopher who grew up amid the maelstrom of war, and has spent his career dissecting our raw interactions with objects to create art that revolves around the notion of encounter.
Having witnessed the ferocity of civil unrest in his native Korea and the turmoil of the Japanese occupation, he has managed to form work that is not marred by the horrors of political upheaval. Instead, he has carved a realm of serenity where people can confront art in peace. He has stripped his work to a state of unashamed nudity where the viewer is forced to reconcile with its bare existence and acknowledge what is in front of them. He installed his works within the Guggenheim himself and the process of meticulously arranging boulders to sit poised on pillows; or a single brushstroke enveloped by white space; or perhaps a rock crunched on a glass plate all illustrate man’s futile efforts to tame nature. Yet this is just one thought amongst many.
Marking Infinity, a five-decade retrospective, is the first show on the North American continent devoted to the 75-year-old artist/philosopher who is based in both Japan & Paris. I think Frank Lloyd Wright’s toilet bowl was the only space in New York to do Lee Ufan’s work justice. The Guggenheim’s blueprint forces a chronological path for the viewer in which they encounter a lived experience of passing time and physical space in which the art itself is rooted in. Lee doesn’t see his works as aesthetic objects but as triggers that use ones visual senses to activate an innate and personal interaction with the work that is already within us.
Without sounding too ridiculous, walking through this exhibition was an almost cleansing experience. There was no barrage of overwhelming context; there was just some personal history, an artistic philosophy and a belief. Besides that, it was just you and the object. I understood that he encourages people to recognise nature as a force more destructive than a product of industry or anything manmade. His work merely plays out his statement of intent; by intentionally dropping the rock on a sheet of glass or a steal plate, he is demonstrating the power of a natural object against something churned by the hand of man. It wouldn’t be unintelligent to draw on Ufan’s childhood experiences of a war torn society where the sanctity of nature around him was constantly raped by man’s technological advances devised to destroy, kill and eliminate. His minimalist aesthetic is a clearly a critique of mass production and he endeavors to allow emptiness to be conveyed, uninterrupted.
(Images via
Guggenheim)
