NEW YORK, N.Y.- For the exhibition Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity, on view through September 28, 2011, the
Guggenheim has produced a special exhibition site charting Lee Ufans creation of a visual, conceptual, and theoretical terrain that has radically expanded the possibilities for painting and sculpture since the 1960s. View the exhibition site.
Organized chronologically by series, the site traces Lees work starting with his involvement in Mono-ha, an antiformalist, materials-based art movement that developed in Tokyo around a series of seminal writings Lee published between 1968 and 1971, through his recent Dialogue series of paintings, which incorporates peformative elements. For each series, explanatory overview texts and curatorial analysis of selected works are provided along with a slideshow of images. Excerpts from Lees writings, drawn from his critical and philosophical essays, appear throughout, offering further insight into Lees writing and thought.
In addition to the Marking Infinity site, the Guggenheim presents an informational video featuring exhibition curator Alexandra Munroe. The short video introduces the retrospective with installation and archival photos and commentary on Lees life and work. As Munroe says, For Lee, each work of art mediates a phenomenological encounter between ourselves, the things and materials before us, and our surrounding space. And that encounter, he says, opens up a realm of infinity. . . . For him, the purpose of art is to trigger our encounterour physical, tactile encounterwith that state, that condition of infinity, which is much larger than ourselves as human beings in the world.