Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity, Guggenheim Museum, New York

Private labours and shifting ideas: 'From Point' (1975)

Lee Ufan grew up amid the tumult of war, but you’d never know it from the serene paintings and sculptures that fan out through the Guggenheim Museum. Born in Korea in 1936, he witnessed the Japanese occupation of his country and the further ferocity of civil war, yet out of that surrounding commotion, he has carved a pristine universe where people can confront art in peace and silence. Boulders scatter across a room, each poised on its own pillow; a single brushstroke hovers on a vast canvas; a rock hunches in front of a steel plate. Lee’s elegant simplicity exerts a restrained force, producing a stark, consoling beauty.

Marking Infinity, a five-decade retrospective, is the first show on this continent devoted to the 75-year-old artist/philosopher who splits his time between Japan and Paris, and whose renown in Asia and Europe far exceeds his modest American reputation. Japan has just inaugurated a whole museum devoted to his work: the 32,000-square foot Lee Ufan Museum, designed by Tadao Ando, opened last year on the island of Naoshima.

But now, with the Guggenheim behind him, Lee seems poised to make a quiet splash in the US. And he deserves to. The paintings are especially strong, perhaps because they betray Lee’s silent struggles against turmoil both without and within. A barely subdued violence clamours behind the cool veneer of even his most minimal works.

Lee has spent much of his career as a sculptor arranging brawny hunks of rock and steel into delicate visual aphorisms. In 1968, he exhibited “Relation”, a broken steel plate dropped on the ground outside a Tokyo art gallery, the two pieces separated by a line of stones like a miniature mountain range. Lee has reassembled that work, now retitled “Relatum”, on the floor of the Guggenheim, where it looks more pristine and deliberately symbolic of the encounter between the natural and manufactured worlds. In a 2008 sequel of sorts, “Relatum – silence b”, a big rock sits parked in front of a nine-foot-high steel plate leaning against the wall. The juxtaposition of rough mineral and rolled metal, of geological and industrial timescales, of environment and artefact, gives this work an almost architectural presence: it’s like a lone tower in the wilderness, at once powerful and ephemeral.

These sculptures emerge from the Japanese avant-garde group Mono-ha, which Lee helped to found in the late 1960s. Like so many crusades of its time, Mono-ha hoped to unchain art from the studio and haul it into the real world. Lee and his cohort placed everyday materials in ordinary places to stage encounters between primordial objects, the built environment and the viewer. Their works had philosophical as well as aesthetic aspirations: to hold in equilibrium the pressures of nature and culture that form our human habitat.

Lee’s stone-and-steel compositions never drifted far from those grand abstractions, and it’s in his paintings that you can sense his more private labours and shifting ideas. There, he seems to have brought his emotions under control by creating rigid rules for himself. For one series from the 1970s, “From Point”, he dunked his brush into a pot of pigment and then pressed the laden bristles against the canvas in regular globs, moving methodically from left to right so that the marks faded as the paint ran out. Then, as if returning the carriage on a typewriter, he moved to the next line and started the process again. The result is a grid that exhales as it progresses towards nothingness, ruthlessly recapitulating the passage of time.

In “From Line”, another series from those years, he dragged the paint-packed brush down the canvas from top to bottom. The parallel vertical stripes pale as the pigment depletes, and the pictures look like floating picket fences, dense and dangerous at the top and gauzily permeable near the ground. Both sets of monochrome works are taut and graceful, belying strict patterning with airy execution.

Towards the end of this fruitful decade, Lee fell into a deep depression. Lines that had looked straight to him now seemed twisted and deformed. He couldn’t bear imperfections that only he could see. “At first I would tear these apart, thinking they were no good,” he wrote. “But ... what I had thought were failed works began to look interesting. They contained lots of opened gaps; the brushwork became radically blurred. And I began to think, why not make more gaps? Make them more disfigured?”

The crisis unleashed Lee’s inner abstract expressionist, and in the 1980s he went on to produce some of his finest paintings. First he untethered the stiff vertical lines, shooting breezes between them, letting them twist and bend like eels poking their dark heads above water. In “With Winds”, squiggles careen into a limitless silver background while others dart forward toward our eyes, or snake across the surface, packing it with pulsing, squirmy life. These thrilling paintings give us a glimpse of the artist’s vulnerable imagination.

In the past two decades, Lee has rediscovered the meticulous discipline of his early years and adopted new strictures. These days he will dip a wide brush in a tub of paint that shades from pearl to charcoal and apply the whole spectrum of greys in a single, plump stroke. The paint, pale on one side and dark on the other, forms a fading square on a white canvas – a confident gesture that does more to activate emptiness than a hundred heedless daubs.

This technique reaches its minimalist apotheosis in the last room, where Lee has slathered one grey brushstroke on each of three walls. These careful smears read as both positive and negative space; they could be windows on to some hazy dimension or solid bodies floating in mid-air. They are Lee’s signature, his tag, his mark of Zorro, the vital swing of an arm against the harrowing void.

Until September 28
Guggenheim Museum