Epitomising Lee Ufan’s command of formal reduction, East Winds (1984) presents a choreographed field of diaphanous brushwork, its fluctuations in saturation and transparency evoking the eddying painterly gusts that define the artist’s seminal ‘Winds’ series of the 1980s. Daubs of cobalt blue pigment are pulled across the canvas in short, repeated gestures, loosely intersecting to create an irregular structure, within which rhythmic units emerge through nuanced gradations of painterly intensity. This work is one of a small number of ‘East Winds’ canvases belonging to Lee’s prolific ‘From Winds’ (c.1982–86) and ‘With Winds’ (c.1987–91) cycles, contributing a distinct visual cadence that exemplifies the artist’s synthesis of traditional Eastern aesthetics and the minimalist impulse that shaped Western art practices in the latter half of the 20th century.

A Korean artist working predominantly in Tokyo, Lee came to prominence in the late 1960s as a founding member and leading theorist of the avant-garde collective Mono-ha (translated as ‘School of Things’), which was dedicated to exploring natural and manufactured materials in their unaltered states as a critical response to Japan’s rapid industrialisation. Primarily sculptural in its orientation and akin to Arte Povera, which emerged concurrently in Europe, Mono-ha included artists such as Nobuo Sekine, Kishio Suga and Noriyuki Haraguchi, with Lee notably positioned as the group’s sole painter. Alongside his sculptural practice, Lee sought to translate Mono-ha’s guiding principles – centred on the relationship between different materials, as well as the dynamics between material, space and viewer – onto the two-dimensional canvas through a methodology of minimal artistic intervention.

This restrained approach, along with Lee’s preoccupation with gesture as both method and meditation, also positions him as a major figure associated with Dansaekhwa (or Tansaekhwa), a monochrome painting style that emerged in mid-1970s Korea, driven by a shared commitment to reconfiguring minimalist abstraction through heightened sensitivity to material and space. In East Winds (1984), each brushstroke is afforded space to breathe, the intervals of muted ground expressing an eloquence equal to that of the discrete marks themselves. These marks, characterised by their variable transparency, possess an autonomy that permits their partial self-erasure – a process that, in turn, enacts the artist’s own effacement.

Commencing in the early 1980s, Lee’s ‘From Winds’ series marked a significant shift from the geometrically oriented compositions of his earlier ‘From Point’ and ‘From Line’ cycles of the 1970s. In East Winds (1984), the uniform vertical lines of these previous works – as evidenced in the 1974 canvas residing in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York – has given way to dynamic, multi-directional arrangements, in which each stroke is similarly made by exhausting the loaded brush yet coalesced to form a broken, cacophonous choreography. Lee’s embrace of simultaneity over seriality introduced heightened complexity to the intervals of empty space woven through the maze-like structures. Comparable to the monumental canvas East Winds n°839027 (1983), residing in the collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, East Winds (1984) affirms its significance within Lee’s wider oeuvre through its meticulous calibration of spontaneous gesture and disciplined, calligraphic repetition. Each notation, though distinct and rarely overlapping, remains locked in dialogue with those around it, imbuing the composition with a rhythmic momentum that underscores the reciprocity between visible mark and activated void – a tenuous harmony sustained solely by the masterful assurance for which Lee is revered.

Distinguishing Lee’s practice is a reflective pursuit that reconciles intellectual enquiry with Japanese painterly inheritances. His incorporation of stone or mineral pigments, which he combines with adhesive to harness a luminous quality, draws upon the material sensibility of traditional Japanese Nihonga painting, while, conceptually, his practice aligns with the minimalist aesthetic that had been gaining global momentum since the 1960s and 1970s. Lee’s elemental gestures of diffused pigment operate through a negotiation between materiality and negative space, paralleling the iconic practice of the Italian formalist Lucio Fontana, who forged his dynamic lines through the deliberate intervention of slashing the canvas. Lee encountered Fontana’s work while travelling in Europe in the 1970s and admired in his tagli (‘cuts’) paintings the rendering of ‘the infinity of space’. In the work of both artists, the painted surface becomes a site of extension, inviting viewers to contemplate the space beyond; yet, while Fontana violently penetrates the canvas, Lee’s action remains meditative.

Considering the materiality of paint through its own reduction, Lee conceives of the painterly gesture as sculptural, even while it progresses into translucency. His art is one of encounter – the ‘East Winds’ paintings, like his sculptures, engage with the idea of site, where meaning is contingent upon the relationship between object and space, gesture and absence. The viewer, too, becomes an active participant, navigating these tensions through a sensitivity to materiality and implicit order. In East Winds (1984), Lee’s repeated, broken lines gradually diffuse, inscribing their existence while simultaneously enacting an expression of impermanence, before resuming again – a cycle that he terms the ‘repetition of infinity’. ‘Each spot is a momentary encounter between me, the canvas, the paint, and the brush, the continuation of discontinuity’ Lee has commented. ‘Their singularity and repetition create a lively pictorial through the relationship of identity and difference. They are traces of life, endlessly similar but endlessly changing, a system of time’ (Lee Ufan, quoted in Gemälde 1973 bis 2001, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany, 2001, p.92).