The volume accompanies the first complete retrospective of the painter and sculptor Lee Ufan in Germany, set up at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Lee is considered one of the most important representatives of the Mono-ha school in Japan - a movement whose artists particularly focused for their work on the combination of raw materials such as stones, branches or earth with industrial materials such as steel or glass - and of the Dansaekhwa movement in Korea - in which Korean artists began to explore abstraction and materiality in the mid-1970s, especially through monochrome painting. Lee Ufan has exhibited around 50 works from the last five decades at Berlin's most important museum space dedicated to contemporary art. The dialogue between the very famous Self-portrait with a velvet cap by Rembrandt, hosted at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, with Lee's vast installation Relatum – The road of mirrors finds a particular space in the volume: an installation through which Lee introduces visitors to the artistic movements of Japan and Korea in the 1970s, as well as providing a new perspective on an iconic work of Western European art.

Sommario
Lee Ufan. The Man in the Middle
Sam Bardaouil

Lee Ufan in Germany. His Beginnings. Eight questions for Lee Ufan
Luisa Bachmann & Lisa Hörstmann

Dialogue With the World. On the Work of Lee Ufan
Silke von Berswordt-Wallrabe

Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits
Lee Ufan

Anthology of historical texts

• World and Structure. Collapse of the Object. Lee Ufan, 1969
• Seeing and Remembering. Yusuke Nakahara, 1973
• East and West: Their Hearts and Their Art. Round-table discussion with
• Joseph Love, Vlasta Čiháková and Lee Ufan, 1974
• Notes 1961 – 1977. Lee Ufan
• The Paintings of Lee Ufan. Yoshiaki Inui, 1980
• Lee Ufan. Artworks are Absolute Events. Interview with Lee Ufan, 1983
• Lee Ufan. The Death of Expression. Haruo Sanda, 1991

Works in the Exhibition

List of Works

Biography

Imprint

Photo Credits

Acknowledgements