PORTO.- Serralves Foundation opened Lee Ufan: Fragments of Infinity, the first major exhibition in Portugal of renowned South Korean-born painter and sculptor Lee Ufan (b. 1936). Set across the expansive 45-acre Serralves Park and the iconic Art Deco Serralves Villa, Fragments of Infinity explores the artist’s groundbreaking approach to blending natural landscapes with architectural environments.

The presentation features three outdoor sculptures, strategically installed throughout the Park to frame direct encounters between stone, steel, and the surrounding environment. Inside the Serralves Villa, visitors will experience Lee’s meditative paintings — including a major new site-specific work.

Three additional sculptures installed inside the Villa invite viewers to explore the tension between materials and context, challenging the boundaries of space and form. Throughout, Fragments of Infinity offers a rigorous inquiry into the interplay between inside and outside, object and landscape, and the perceptual encounter that the artist has long articulated—affirming art as an ongoing and active dialogue with the world.

Philippe Vergne, curator of the exhibition, said, “Working with Lee Ufan is a privilege and a lesson. A lesson in uncompromising philosophical and aesthetic rigor. His use of material, his language, his syntax has only gotten more profound, more precise and more exigent over the years. His paintings, his sculptures make us see what is imperceptible: the nature of space, of light, of time. He invites us to value and to protect what is evanescent, what is the most vulnerable. Being in the presence of Lee Ufan's œuvre is a lesson in humility as it shapes that we are, in space and in time, a tiny fragment of infinity”.

Fragments of Infinity features four of Lee’s Response [2023, 2025] paintings, each composed of a white canvas with gradient fields that move from black to white through bright reds and blues. Created during the emergence of the Korean Dansaekhwa painting movement of the 1970s, these works employ minimal, often singular brushstrokes on expansive, meticulously prepared surfaces to explore breath, time, emptiness, and presence. These gestures enact a peaceful dialogue between mark-making and the perception of void, inviting measured and quiet contemplation.

Also on view are sculptures from Lee’s Relatum series. Each work brings together large, natural stones, which Lee understands as condensed time, with industrial materials such as steel plates or glass. These carefully balanced combinations heighten viewers’ awareness of the space, gravity, and tension existing between matter, nature, human-made objects, and the surrounding site. Relatum, a term the artist adopted in the early 1970s, emphasizes the dialogue between elements, rather than a focus on autonomous objects.

The Relatum works on view include Relatum — The Sky Road (2026), Relatum — Dialogue (2026), and Relatum — Jump Stand (2026), all of which feature encounters between large stones and steel plates. In addition, Relatum — Silentium (2026), which situates a stone in front of a canvas; Relatum — The Dream of Stone (2026), an encounter between stone and light; and Relatum — Dwelling (2026), for which delicately layered stones cover the floor of the Villa’s atrium, will also be on view.

During his time at Serralves, Lee Ufan has created a new, site-specific work in one of the spaces within the Villa. Executed directly on the wall, the painting results from a disciplined exercise in which breath and rhythm are brought into harmony, embodying the artist’s meditative practice.

As a core figure and principal theoretician of the Japanese Mono-ha (“School of Things”) avant-garde movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Lee played a pivotal role in shifting the focus of contemporary art away from representation and toward direct encounters with materials and their spatial relationships. Lee and other Mono-ha artists used raw, unaltered materials—stone, wood, metal, glass—in simple yet profound juxtapositions that revealed the inherent qualities of these substances, while simultaneously activating surrounding space.

This emphasis on dialogue permeates both his painting and sculpture. Whether between brushstroke and ground, stone and steel, object and viewer, Lee’s work eschews isolation, fostering an ongoing conversation that emphasizes the space between. This dialogue gives shape to his lifelong interest in the inside/outside relationship—how forms communicate with their environment, how presence is deeply connected to absence, and how meaning arises through encounter, exchange, and interaction.

Fragments of Infinity is organized by the Serralves Foundation — Museum of Contemporary Art, in cooperation with SCAI The Bathhouse.