Leading Mono-ha artist Lee Ufan has just opened his first solo exhibition of new works at Pace Hong Kong, running through January 9, 2016.The show, which is Lee’s first presentation in Hong Kong after a large, critically acclaimed retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York in 2011, and a solo show at Versailles in the summer of 2014, is a timely opportunity to reflect on the steady reassessment of the work of one of the most significant postwar Japanese art movements.Contemporaneous with other historically important tendencies such as American Minimalism, Italian Arte Povera, and British Anti-Form, Mono-ha represented a certain Japanese interpretation of the global critical response to modernism and the values it espoused.Unlike the conceptually centered approaches that dominated Western art of the time, however, Mono-ha was chiefly experiential and phenomenological: its artworks sought to home in on the specific material qualities of the objects used to make them, as well as the mutually interdependent relationships that arose between objects or artworks and the spaces in which they were situated.Lee’s practice, which focus on a form of “dialogue” in his recent works, draw from a long historical lineage of hidden “relations” in Asian philosophy and art. In this sense, his works might be seen not so much as assemblages of objects, but rather situations that spark off a contemplative state that reflects on the invisible energies surrounding both the object in question and its surrounding environment. Follow @ARTINFOHongKong
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