Stone, steel, silence

Walk into a Lee Ufan room and your first instinct is to look for the work. There is a stone. There is a steel plate. There is a great deal of floor. Then it arrives: the work is not the objects. It is the distance.

To make the world appear, the artist sometimes has to make almost nothing.

Born in Korea, formed in Japan, exhibited across Europe, Lee Ufan is himself a figure of relation. His Relatum series — relation — sets the natural against the industrial and lets the air between them do the talking.

On canvas the same patience appears as paint: a stroke loaded with pigment, drawn down until the brush gives out. Fullness to nothing. It is the seascape's horizon turned vertical — time, again, made visible.