Artist Lee Ufan Opens a Dazzling New Museum in Arles – RisePEI

Because the late Nineteenth-century when Impressionists, most notably Vincent van Gogh, flocked there, Arles has lengthy fascinated artists and the artwork world by extension. Extra lately, cultural areas have begun to open on this southeastern French metropolis, beginning with the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles in 2010 and extra lately collector Maja Hoffmann’s Frank Gehry–designed LUMA Arles, which opened final summer season.

And now there may be the Lee Ufan Arles, a brand new cultural venue by the acclaimed Korean artist, Lee Ufan, that opened its doorways on April 15 on the coronary heart of the Roman metropolis. (The brand new venue is an extension of the New York–based mostly Lee Ufan Basis.) The trail to finish this venture has not been a simple one for Lee, who needed to create an endowment fund that was supported by his buddies: Michel Enrici, the previous director of the Maeght Basis in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, in addition to his publishers on the Arles-based Actes Sud, Jean-Paul Capitani and Françoise Nyssen.

A lion share of the fund went towards investing within the area’s new house. Located within the Hôtel Vernon, a Sixteenth-century non-public mansion that was as soon as the house of the Dervieux household, a protracted line of vintage sellers, the constructing has, after all, been retrofitted below the aegis of Pritzker Prize winner Tadao Ando, Lee’s go-to architect. “Ando’s inspiration and mine resonate,” the artist mentioned in a current interview carried out in French. The architect behind mega-collector François Pinault’s lately opened Parisian non-public museum Bourse de Commerce, Ando can also be accountable for the Lee Ufan Museum on the Japanese island of Naoshima (2010) and the Area Lee Ufan on the Busan Museum of Artwork (2015) in South Korea.

A number one proponent of the Nineteen Sixties Japanese Mono-ha motion, which explored the properties of commercial and pure supplies, Lee is best-known for confronting metal plates, rubber sheets, and glass panes with stone, wooden, or water even, of their bodily varieties to create effortlessly poetic sculptures, lots of that are central to the brand new Arles area.

It’s not so stunning that, after leaving his mark on Asia, Lee would relocate a part of his New York basis to France. The 86-year-old artist, who’s represented by French gallerist Kamel Mennour, amongst others, has been exhibited throughout France for years, and he maintains a studio in Paris’s Montmartre district, the place van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, and Picasso all lived in some unspecified time in the future earlier than him.

The true query is why Arles? That is the place his 2013 present “Dissonance,” which led to the publication by Actes Sud of his first monograph in French, occurred, earlier than showings on the Château de Versailles (2014) and the Centre Pompidou Metz (2019) made him an enormous hit all through France. “I’m particularly charmed by town’s fragrance the place time fades away amidst the treasures of Roman tradition,“ he mentioned.

The artist was additionally lately requested to partake within the celebrations of Arles’ 40 years as a UNESCO World Heritage website. Operating via September, the ensuing out of doors show options 13 works scattered throughout the 4th-century Alyscamps necropolis, a website imbued with spirituality. “Since we’re in Arles, I attempted to precise a dimension that transcends space-time,” he mentioned.

At Lee Ufan Arles, the four-story, 14,500-square-feet hôtel particulier consists of almost 25 rooms, the very first being a luminous store and ticket workplace rolled in a single, adopted by a sublime library, which can be changed into a tearoom sooner or later, each courtesy of award-winning French designer Constance Guisset.

Within the first gallery, which as soon as doubtless served because the visitor entrance for the Dervieux household, stands on the heart a monumental concrete cylinder that could be a slender snail-shaped labyrinth meant to be entered. Inside lies a flooring projection of white clouds slowly shifting via the air. “Like van Gogh earlier than him, Lee Ufan was very a lot impressed by the Arlesian sky,” mentioned Jean-Marie Gallais, curator of the 2019 Lee Ufan present on the Centre Pompidou Metz, who has additionally written wall textual content for the Arles area.

Lee confirmed, “The moments of my morning walks gazing on the sky alongside the quays of the Rhone make me really feel joyful.” He’s titled this model new work, an architectural collaboration with Ando, Ciel sous terre (Sky below earth).

As with earlier initiatives, Lee has paid particular consideration to site-specific installations all through the mansion’s grounds. Chemin vers Arles (Street to Arles) superbly presents a curved mirror slab set upon the gravel. Simply because the mirror begins its curve upward to the ceiling, Lee has place between two massive boulders. And older items have been reactivated, too. The Stage (initially conceived in late ’60s), within the second gallery, is a working example. Guests are as soon as once more invited to step right into a circle of sunshine shielded by a big metal wall subsequent to an enormous rock.

Somewhat additional are two examples from Lee’s “Relatum” sequence (Relatum 1969/2022 and Relatum – Gravité), which synthesize the artist’s earliest experiments with Mono-ha. Between these two works is a Roman bust found within the early stage of development, about 2.5 toes underground, precisely the place Lee had already deliberate to put in Ciel sous terre. “It’s ironic, when you consider it, that the one place that wanted to be dug would show a video illustration of the sky”, Gallais, the curator, mentioned. Now a long-term mortgage from the Musée de l’Arles vintage, the relic has its personal window case in the course of a brief hallway resulting in an ascending staircase, which Lee had painted in white, and a brand new elevator.

Taking place to the area’s decrease degree, which is accessible solely by appointment, usually are not one, however three site-specific creations. Two works from the “Dialogue” sequence, swaths of gradations of colours—one in oranges, one other in blues—coming from exceptionally broad brushstrokes, have been painted on the ground. Lee compares them to “archeological findings” for the general public to probability upon. The orange-dominated one is perpendicular; the blue-heaven one is parallel to a white wall the place the artist has handwritten a poem referred to as “The Backside”: “On the backside of Arles there’s a story, / on the backside of this story there may be a picture, / and on the backside of this picture there may be the unknown.”

Again above floor, the strategy on the second flooring (the primary flooring in accordance with the French system) is principally chronological, beginning together with his Seventies sequence “From Line,” with stripes painted in a single gesture till the exhaustion of paint, to the 2000s “Dialogues” sequence, the newest items of which embody wavy traces that convey deeper vibrations. The show contains drawings from the Nineteen Eighties, some surprisingly much less minimalist than others.

One degree up is a forthcoming “hybrid” multipurpose area, for conferences, conferences, receptions, and live shows, in addition to exhibitions of artists who usually are not Lee Ufan. (He want to embody works from his private assortment within the everlasting show, “however nothing has been thought of intimately but,” he mentioned.)

This space is the one place within the constructing the place the unique moldings and genuine chimneys have been stored seen, as if to make individuals really feel extra at house. As a matter of truth, the artist mentioned he sees the Lee Ufan Arles as a “place to stay” quite than an exhibition corridor, including that “understanding the intelligence or the which means of this area will not be required to share the breath and sensations that life offers us whereas strolling among the many work and sculptures.”