The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

LEE U-FAN The artist's garden in Kamakura, Japan, 2001 Photographs: Suhanya Raffel The works here represent two well-established features of Lee's career - paintings, whether they are on canvas or multi-panelled screens, and sculpture. Each has inseparable links to his previous work, as Lee's is not a career littered with diversions or radical change. The intonations within a process, the ideas that have almost inexhaustible permutations, have enabled the artist to take a few profound principles and find endless nuances to express them. Despite the deliberateness and certainty of both his sculptures and his paintings, nothing is static. The materials of his sculptures or the simple brushstrokes of his paintings are unable to assert their independence from surrounding space, contexts and relationships. All sculptural and pictorial elements are, as Lee might say, in perpetual correspondence with each other. The considered immediacy of the paintings cannot be repeated in any precise and prefigured manner. The sculptures, deliberate as they might be, are unique on each occasion they are exhibited. This is despite the 'Relatum' series invariably confining itself to two materials - rock and metal. Each part is selected because of its unique characteristics. A rock is not used as an abstract principle or as a theoretical prop, but is selected because its attributes and 'personality' sharpen the connections between the viewer and Lee's intent of creating a heightened understanding of the external world. This connection is further emphasised through the juxtaposition of industrial steel plates. The natural rock engages in a correspondence with the man-made. Each defines and intensifies the purpose of the other; yet, self-evidently, they combine as a single work. It is to be expected that the 'Relatum' works are seen as a fusion of East and West, possessing a sufficient originality to sit comfortably within Modernism's scheme of things - Lee's sculpture as an orientalised minimalism cum formalism; the paintings as lyrically abstract with their calligraphic bravura. However, we are wrong if we expect to find in Lee's art the characterisation of a late twentieth century East/West modernity. Most of all, what foils this interpretation is that Lee's use of media is not just a method to convey an idea. The materials and their inherent uniqueness are employed to reveal openness beyond their observed, literal meaning: perhaps a Buddhist perspective of things in flux, always changing yet interconnected in ever– varying ways. Lee's determined anti-illusionism and rejection of image enables him to reach a closer connection with his intention of dealing with the idea of infinity. Ultimately, of course, this is incapable of being expressed with any descriptive authority, but is evoked in the mind's eye of the viewer. Lee does not attempt to create symbols to connect us with observable fact. In his paintings - whether they be the gestural lyricism of With Winds 1989 or the taut simplicity of the 'Correspondance' series, all the brushstrokes or marks are in perpetual correspondence with each other as well as with the field or open space that contains them. A few broad gestures on a white canvas are not simply marks that create an engaging and dynamic formal tension . In one sense, each stroke serves as a denial of the much– valued Western belief in abstraction being complete within itself and free of symbolic representation. Lee, however, seeks to connect us with the understanding of a cosmic precept that a moment of beginning ultimately returns to its point of origin. For more than 30 years the paintings have been characterised by the deliberateness and restraint of each gesture but, in works such as With Winds, they also embrace a looser handling of an idiosyncratic form of painting or calligraphy in Lee's typically sparse execution. Lee does not seek to explain or interpret. His art is not didactic in any conventional sense. It is not intended to describe phenomena or abstract principles, but to enable us to look for, if not connect with, higher states of consciousness and perception. In doing so, however, we must realise that perception, learning, knowledge and understanding need not necessarily be logically connected. Lee's works can be finished but remain incomplete. They are not animated in themselves, but become so through their relationships to the space that surrounds them . We are intimately associated with that space and central to the correspondences that take place within it. Doug Hall is the Director of the Queensland Art Gallery. 65