This summer, the monumental Gothic architecture of the Palais des Papes in Avignon celebrates the work of Lee Ufan. The impressive and historic palace welcomes Relatum, a major presentation by Korean-born artist Lee Ufan, whose work has, for decades, explored the delicate relationship between objects, space, time and perception.

The Palais des Papes is an architecture of enormous presence: imposing walls, vaulted rooms and centuries of religious and political power. Lee Ufan is recognised for his unconventional artistic processes which underscore the relationship between the viewer, the artwork, and the spaces they inhabit and for philosophical writings that challenge prevailing notions of artmaking with attention on spatial and temporal conditions.

The title Relatum, used by Lee Ufan for much of his sculptural practice, refers to relationship. His works are not conceived simply as autonomous objects, but as encounters between natural and industrial elements, between permanence and intervention, weight and suspension, presence and absence. Mennour describes the meeting of stone and steel as central to this practice: the stone carries an almost immeasurable geological history, while steel represents a material transformed by human industry. The contrast between the spectacular ornate architecture and the purity of Lee Ufan’s artistic gesture is striking!

The resulting compositions do not attempt to compete with the architecture. Instead, they slow the visitor down enough to notice it. Lee Ufan emerged as a leading theorist and artist of Mono-ha, or the “School of Things,” in Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His practice has remained concerned with what happens when objects are allowed to retain their own physical identities rather than being forced into conventional artistic forms. Across sculpture and painting, he has developed an art of intervals: between one mark and another, one object and another, the visible and the space that surrounds it.

That philosophy has made his work particularly powerful in historic and architectural settings. His interventions have previously appeared at the Château de Versailles, Centre Pompidou-Metz, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and the Rijksmuseum Gardens in Amsterdam. At Versailles in 2014, for example, his monumental Relatum – The Arch of Versailles placed stone and steel in dialogue with the palace and its gardens, demonstrating how little an artist sometimes needs to do to profoundly alter our perception of a place.

In Avignon, that principle takes on an almost spiritual dimension. The Palais des Papes was built as a seat of papal power, a place whose architecture was designed to communicate permanence and authority. Lee Ufan’s works introduce a different kind of monumentality, one based not on scale, decoration or grandeur, but on stillness.

The timing is significant, too. Relatum forms part of celebrations marking 140 years of diplomatic relations between France and Korea, while the 80th edition of the Avignon Festival has selected Korean as its guest language. The exhibition therefore sits within a broader cultural exchange, but its significance goes beyond diplomacy. Lee Ufan’s work has always occupied a space between cultures and disciplines: Korean by birth, shaped profoundly by his years in Japan, and long based between Paris and Kamakura.

What ultimately makes Relatum so compelling is its refusal to demand attention in the conventional sense. There is no spectacle to consume, no abundance of information to process. Instead, Lee Ufan asks the visitor to pause. To look at a stone. To notice the distance between two materials. To become conscious of one’s own body moving through an ancient room.

Lee Ufan: Relatum is on view at the Palais des Papes, Avignon, until 15 November 2026.