Opened in 2022, the Lee Ufan Foundation is the artist’s first permanent institution in Europe and an architectural and philosophical statement. Located in the historic centre of Arles in the south of France, a city long associated with arts and culture, the foundation occupies the Hôtel Vernon, a townhouse dating from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Renovated in close collaboration with Tadao Ando, the building has been transformed into a remarkable space for the presentation of Lee Ufan’s work. Architecture, light and space are integral to the experience.

Lee Ufan has long challenged dominant ideas of art as expression or representation. His practice, across painting, sculpture and writing, rests on a different premise: that meaning arises through relationships between materials, space and the viewer, and through time spent with them. These concerns were articulated early. His first solo exhibition at Sato Gallery in Tokyo in 1967 coincided with the publication of The Aesthetics of Self-Contradiction, a critical text that questioned aesthetics, cultural production and national identity. The drawings and paintings he produced in the mid-1960s translated this critique into visual form, leading to the From Point and From Line series, completed in 1984. Some works from this series are on view in Arles. Built from repeated dots or lines, these works fuse Eastern and Western philosophical traditions, foregrounding process, structure and duration over image.

In 1968, Lee emerged as the leading theorist and practitioner of Mono-ha (the School of Things) alongside artists including Nobuo Sekine, Takamatsu Jirō and Kishio Suga. Rejecting Western notions of representation, Mono-ha focused on material presence and perception, assembling works from raw natural and industrial materials with minimal intervention. That same year, Lee presented Phenomenon and Perception B at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo: a stone dropped onto a glass plate. He later titled his sculptural works Relatum (1968–), underscoring their status as elements within a relational field shaped by space, context and encounter.

By the mid-1970s, Lee had returned to painting while teaching at Tama Art University, where he would remain until 2007. He became a central figure in Dansaekhwa, the Korean monochrome movement defined by repetitive, process-based gestures that register bodily action and time. From the 1980s onward, he developed further painting cycles, From Winds, With Winds, Correspondence and Dialogue, each refining the tension between gesture, surface and surrounding space. Alongside these, he continued to produce large-scale Relatum installations, exhibited widely across Europe and Japan.

France occupies a particular place in Lee’s practice. In 2014, he undertook a two-year residency at the Manufacture de Sèvres, producing terracotta and porcelain works shaped by chance, collapse and the unpredictable agency of fire. These ceramics extended his interest in contingency and in the autonomy of materials, an approach that runs consistently through his work.

The foundation brings these trajectories into sharp focus. The renovation of the Hôtel Vernon mirrors Lee’s insistence on clarity and relational space. Spread across several levels, the galleries present paintings, sculptures and installations with an emphasis on spacing and silence, making the viewer’s movement and duration of attention integral to the work. The navigation in the space is natural and chronological.

This sensitivity to context extends beyond the foundation’s walls. Lee Ufan’s sculptures and paintings were installed across the ancient necropolis of the Alyscamps, in 2021-2022, a site where Roman tombs, trees and open sky form a charged landscape. In this show titled Requiem, his works emphasised their relation to the natural world, generating a poetic symbiosis between art and site.

The dialogue is particularly resonant in Arles, a city long associated with artistic reflection and intensity, from Van Gogh to Gauguin, Christian Lacroix and Flamenco culture, and one in which landscape, history (Roman presence) and creative experimentation remain inseparable.

More than a monographic museum, the foundation positions itself as a space for meditation. Temporary exhibitions and public programmes extend Mr Lee’s ideas beyond his own oeuvre. Recently, the foundation persented a dialogue between Pistoletto and Lee Ufan and more contemporary art shows are planned for 2026. His extensive writings, more than seventeen books spanning poetry, philosophy and criticism, including the influential essay From Object to Being, remain a key reference point. A small library and seating area welcome visitors from around the world.

In Arles, the Lee Ufan Foundation resists spectacle. It offers a rigorous, quietly insistent proposition: that art is not an object to be consumed, but a condition to be experienced in a spectacular space perfectly merging Provencal’s references (beautiful tomettes are everywhere).

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