Artist Biography

b.1936
Lee was born in South Korea in 1936 and 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. His studies enabled him to become a pioneering figure in the Japanese Mono-ha movement and Korean Dansaekhwa movement, where he drew from philosophical discourse to find new, minimalist, and spiritually evocative ways of artistic expression.

Lee has been honoured with numerous solo exhibitions and major retrospectives at distinguished public institutions internationally, including the National Art Center in Tokyo (JP, 2022), the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (2023), the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2011) and the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007). He was awarded the Praemium Imperiale for painting in 2001 and the UNESCO Prize in 2000.

In 2010, the Lee Ufan Museum, dedicated to the
artist’s oeuvre, opened on the Japanese island of Naoshima. His exhibition centre at the Hôtel Vernon in Arles, a seventeenth-century building located near the city's Roman arena, remodeled by his friend the architect Tadao Ando, opened on 5 April 2022.  Public collections include: Centre Pompidou in Paris, MoMA, Tate Collection in London, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, and the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, among many others.