Lee Ufan’s six-decade-spanning retrospective at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin is an occasion for rediscovery—not only of the seminal works of an important artist and a key figure in two major Asian art movements of the second half of the 20^th century but also of the ideas and societal shifts that have shaped them. The works in the exhibition emanate philosophical ideas relating to Universalism, an insistence on a unifying truth that transcends the boundaries of culture, nationality, religion—or social media. In our current moment of divisive, essentialist discourses—not to mention the dangerous “tailoring” of information through algorithms—this exhibition, curated by the directors of Hamburger Bahnhof, Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, feels like a precious opportunity to contemplate our shared physical presence.

In fact, the underlying aspiration in Ufan’s oeuvre is the reduction of the representation of the self. “The idea of Mono-ha is to reduce yourself, to express yourself less, to just move what’s there a little bit, to tweak it a little bit,” Ufan says of the Japanese movement, translated as “School of Things,” in a video produced for the retrospective. The South Korean artist spent most of his professional life in Japan and is considered one of the originators and main theorists of the Mono-ha school of thought, which explored the encounters between natural and industrial materials. The movement developed in the post-war era concurrently with other Minimalist art movements worldwide, including Dansaekhwa in Korea, which Ufan was also a part of. Through some 60 paintings, sculptures and installations, this chronologically arranged survey is an expression of an artist’s lifelong engagement with the paradox of mark-making as a conduit of ideas about space and presence, but not of the hand that holds the brush.

“Today, we are faced with an even more difficult time,” Ufan says in the video about this show, “so I hope that by visiting my exhibition many will recall the atmosphere of a fresh start in the 1960s and early 1970s and feel how times have changed, and how it hints at what lies ahead.” The exhibition opens with Ufan’s seminal work Relatum ongoing since 1968 which the artist restaged in the museum’s space. The sculpture consists of a stone which Ufan places forcefully on a large square of glass, such that it cracks or even shatters. He first created the work in the wake of the May ‘68 student protests and the emergence of a global anti-war movement—an era in which “existing values were questioned and a new start was made,” as he describes. Since then, all of his sculptural installations bear the name Relatum, a Latin term which refers to the interconnectedness and relation of elements within a system. Here, Relatum is surrounded by early wall works in fluorescent colours, such as Landscape I and II, which are rather uncharacteristic in their use of paint to cover the entire surface, as the viewer would realise by the end of the show. With these pieces, which Ufan recreated for the show, he sought to highlight the unreliability of vision through optically dazzling planes.

Repetitions and variations feature as a central aspect of all of the canvases that followed in the 1970s and ‘80s. These paintings carry the titles From Point or From Line and are created by dipping the brush once in paint, usually a warm orange or a deep cold blue and touching the brush to the canvas, again and again, to create precisely positioned dots or lines until the paint traces become too faint—only to then start again. These works, which the viewer encounters repeatedly in the sprawling exhibition’s galleries, “explore the relationship between emptiness and gesture” according to the curators, and “evoke a sense of movement and direction.” They also read like representations of the passing of time, of the faculty of memory, or the sublimation of an experience into knowledge: An imprint or a trace that claims its space despite being barely graspable. A resonance. “There is no special theme for the exhibition,” Ufan explains in the video, “but if I summarise what I have done in one or two words it will be meeting and resonating. When you walk into my exhibition I want it to be a place where you have an encounter, and it’s not something you don’t know—it’s something you knew that’s reaffirmed, and it’s something that gives you a sense of joy.”

A unique highlight of the exhibition comes in the form of a dialogue with Rembrandt van Rijn. Rembrandt’s painting Self-Portrait with Velvet Beret from 1634, which shows the young painter turning his head to face the viewer, is on loan from Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, a museum managed by the same body that governs the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum. Ufan, who has been profoundly influenced by Rembrandt’s work, especially his use of light and shadows, casts the masterpiece within his room-filling installation Relatum – The Narrow Sky Road (2020/2023). Here, the gallery is transformed into a gesamtkunstwerk that contemplates how the physical space around an artwork is changed by the relation between the work and its viewer. The floor is covered in white gravel and a long, narrow stainless steel plate is placed in the middle of the room as if leading visitors to the painting on the wall. However, the mirrored steel plate cannot be walked on, and two large white stones flank the narrow path. (Meanwhile, an intervention by Ufan is staged inside the Rembrandt Hall of the Gemäldegalerie, where the museum’s 16 Rembrandts are on permanent display.)

“When you look at a Rembrandt painting, you can forget about yourself,” Ufan says in the video. “There’s a tremendous resonance with something that’s underneath you, that’s beyond you. That’s why I’m so moved by his paintings. I have this longing that underneath what I’m trying to express there’s some kind of power, some kind of resonance that connects me to something that Rembrandt was thinking about or expressing for a long time.”

Lee Ufan retrospective is on view until April 28, 2024, at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin.