This catalog accompanies the first comprehensive retrospective of the Korean painter and sculptor Lee Ufan (born 1936) in Germany. The exhibition gathers around 50 works from the past five decades, featuring an extraordinary highlight. Rembrandt’s famous Self-Portrait with Velvet Beret (1634) from the Berlin Gemäldegalerie is shown for the first time at Hamburger Bahnhof alongside Lee’s expansive installation Relatum – The Mirror Road (2016–23). Ufan, who repeatedly refers to European roots in his corpus of works, enters into a multilayered dialogue with the Old Master.
This monograph presents ample installation shots, as well as thorough scholarship on Ufan’s immense impact on the postwar art movements of Japan and Korea; how the artist’s philosophical writings shaped the collective Mono-ha (School of Things), which was active in Tokyo from 1968 to 1975; and how his abstract paintings of the mid-1970s are emblematic of the Korean collective Dansaekhwa.