Lee Ufan: Fragments of Infinity at the Serralves House and Park

Lee Ufan painting on stone, Hakone Valley, Japan, 1998

From the Serralves Website:

In the context of his first major exhibition in Portugal at Casa e Parque de Serralves, Lee’s aesthetic experiments are brought into sharp relief. Here, the dialogues he has maintained throughout his six-decade practice unfold between built architecture and landscape. The exhibition features three outdoor sculptures, installed in the park to create direct encounters between stone, steel, and the environment; five paintings, including a site-specific work, whose meditative quality contrasts with the architectural structure; and three sculptures installed inside the house, each arranged to reveal the tension between the materials and their contexts.

By placing Lee Ufan’s work in and around the villa’s orderly interiors and the park’s natural expanses, the exhibition stages the artist’s rigorous inquiry into the interplay of inside/outside, object and landscape, and the perceptual encounter that Lee has long articulated — affirming art as an ongoing and active dialogue with the world.

Exhibition information: https://www.serralves.pt/en/ciclo-serralves/2607-lee-ufan/

This exhibition is on view from October 16, 2026 to March 2027.

Relatum: Lee Ufan at the Palais des Papes

Photo by David Giancatarina

Presented by the City of Avignon:

At the invitation of the City of Avignon, the Palais des Papes is preparing to welcome one of the greatest masters of international contemporary art: Lee Ufan. This summer, the Gothic monument, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, will become the stage for a masterful encounter between sacred architecture and a work of rare spiritual intensity. This international event is part of the 140th anniversary of diplomatic relations between France and Korea, a celebration in which the City of Avignon is fully participating, echoing the Avignon Festival, which has chosen Korean as its guest language for its 80th edition.

Exhibition info: https://palais-des-papes.com/event/relatum-lee-ufan-au-palais-des-papes/

Exhibition on view from July 3 – December 6, 2026
Palais des Papes, Avignon

Lee Ufan at Dia Beacon

Lee Ufan, From Line, 1978, and Relatum, 1974/2019. Lee Ufan, installation view, Dia Beacon, New York, 2026–27. © Lee Ufan/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York

From the Dia Art website:

Lee Ufan is a founding member of Mono-ha (School of Things), a loosely defined group of artists who worked in a shared sculptural idiom in Japan roughly between 1969 and ’74. In work from that time, rather than asserting or denying authorship over an object, Lee distributed forms across what he called a “system” of material and physical relations that inherently incorporate the viewer. Alongside the three sculptures emblematic of his Mono-ha period, this exhibition presents eight paintings dating from the 1970s through the early ’90s, which recently entered Dia’s collection and where the artist foregrounded the canvas as a space populated by both presence and absence.

Exhibition information: https://www.diaart.org/exhibition/exhibitions-projects/lee-ufan-exhibition-363

This exhibition is on long-term view at Dia Beacon.

Lee Ufan at San Marco Art Centre (SMAC), Venice

Photo by Lorenzo Palmieri, courtesy of Pace Gallery

From the SMAC website:

Dia Art Foundation presents a major solo presentation of work by Lee Ufan at SMAC Venice (San Marco Art Centre), an official Collateral Event of the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Curated by Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg Director, the landmark exhibition opens on May 9, 2026.

Exhibition details: https://smacvenice.org/whats-on/lee-ufan

Exhibition on view from May 9 – November 22, 2026
SMAC Venice

Lee Ufan: Quiet Resonance

Within spaces designed by the artist, this exhibition by Lee Ufan distils over six decades of considered experimentation into a series of recent paintings and sculptures created especially for the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Lee’s sparing use of simple materials, including stone, steel and canvas, has a quiet force that encourages contemplation and consideration of the physical and intellectual self in relation to the work. Lee is also a writer whose philosophical approach to art embraces Zen Buddhism and Confucianism, alongside the ideas of classical and modern European philosophers.  

Lee values the power of emptiness to generate both harmony and tension between objects and people. For him, the space around objects is as significant as the objects themselves. His conceptual and minimalist approach has been influential in art, design and philosophy, with artists Anish Kapoor and Park Seo-Bo as well as architect Tadao Ando among the prominent figures inspired by his art. 

Born in Korea in 1936, Lee lives between Japan and France. He studied painting in Seoul before relocating to Tokyo to study philosophy. In the 1960s he was a founder of Japan’s Mono-ha (School of Things) movement, which emphasised relationships between natural and industrial materials, and between objects and their viewers. He was also associated with the Dansaekhwa monochrome movement that emerged in Korea in the 1950s as part of a search for a universal aesthetic that was separate from tradition and without nationalist associations. 

It's been almost 50 years since Lee’s work was presented at the Art Gallery in the 1976 Biennale of Sydney. His first Sydney solo exhibition follows recent exhibitions of his work at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin, National Art Center in Tokyo, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, Centre Pompidou-Metz, Gwangju Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/whats-on/exhibitions/lee-ufan/

Exhibition on view from 31 August 2024 – September 2025
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Naala Nura building, Ground level, Asian Lantern galleries