By Long Tran

I think of art sometimes as a human impulse to assert individuality: an attempt to impress ourselves onto the world.

Stepping into a gallery feels as such. These spacious halls and tall walls draw my attention to expressions on canvasses, marbles, and clay. Beautiful, mostly. Awesome, at times. Expressions stamped to last forever. Are these not the most successful attempts at eternal life?

Works from history serve as cultural artefacts and treasures to be preserved for succession. They are at a distance, often bordered to avoid any other human touch. No matter how revolutionary, they can feel boxed in, whether by frames, glass containers, or the pristine gallery itself.

Such was my expectation in the elevator climbing fifty floors to Mori Contemporary Art Museum in a posh part of Tokyo for the STARS exhibit. STARS displays six creative giants from Japan who helped shaped the contemporary art scene. Included were the likes of Yayoi Kusama with her magnetic Infinity Nets and Takahashi Murakami’s bombastic blend of low and high art.

Stepping into Lee Ufan’s exhibit destabilised me. The floor was spread with gravel. Lighting dimmed. Relatum: a black boulder sits on a cracked glass plate. Relatum – Dissonance: two poles, two boulders, one pole placed on one boulder, the other lies apart. Two large but sparse paintings from a series called Dialogue.

Lee Ufan, “Dialogue”, 2020. Acrylic on canvas — Lee Ufan, “*Dialogue”,* 2020. Acrylic on canvas

I am not an art historian and I do not come from a family of artistic people. I cannot look at an artwork and lecture you about its place in history or even its aesthetic value on the spot (even after a course on the philosophy of aesthetics, I still have no idea what the term means). What I do have, is a fascination with space, time, and silence. A sense of myself rooted in the land, the ambient, and the environment. And, ultimately, a faint intuition for beautiful ideas. Lee’s works check all my boxes. Something in me felt unlocked.

Lee Ufan belongs to Mono-ha or the School of Things. Acting as the theoretician of the group, he posits them as ‘happeners’: a neologism that derives from ‘to happen’ as ‘painters’ is derived from ‘to paint’. This word hints at an important feature of Mono-ha. That the happening is as important as, but not more than the happened. A Dialogue painting is hours of concentrated brushstrokes repeated for weeks, rigorously and deliberately. The Relatum sculpture is hours of markings on the glass plates to make it looks broken. However, these processes are almost invisible to the view upon the first encounter. We only see the forms on the canvas or the ground. Paradoxically, what happened, those formed objects, in themselves do not amount to anything modern. They remain in their primal form, and refuse symbolic interpretation.

Yet, they happen. Their sheer material presence, rigorously arranged, is a vehicle for viewers to shift their perspective. Lee defines the Mono-ha as employing an aesthetics of relationality. Their physicality reflects our own, like the glass plate of Relatum. In stepping inside this space, we are forced to come into an equal relationship with these bare and half-natural objects. Being with them in there confronts us with our own material existence inside an artificial environment. Ideas may last forever but things are doomed to crumble. The works of Mono-ha are not created to last and instead emphasise a sense of ephemerality. Spacetime may not be expressed but is keenly felt.

Lee Ufan, Installation view: STARS: Six Contemporary Artists from Japan to the World, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2020. Photo: Takayama Kozo — Lee Ufan, Installation view: *STARS: Six Contemporary Artists from Japan to the World*, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2020. Photo: Takayama Kozo

I cannot help but identify myself with him: he lives in Japan but grew up elsewhere; graduated in Western philosophy but embedded in the Asian fabric of thought. Lee states that he is not well acquainted with Zen or Buddhism, despite that being the connection that people make to his work. I do not think the connection is irrational. Impermanence and interdependence resonate through the sculptures. The gravel in the gallery reminds me of the Japanese garden: that deft use of space to suggest an ascetic elegance. Yet his education is mostly Western. Lee actively references several phenomenologists in his interviews and writings. We can recast his work then, through the lenses of consciousness and experience. The philosopher Martin Heidegger conceives of man as a Lichtung or ‘clearing’ whose purpose in the world is to reveal the world as it is. Our consciousness ought to be a gap between the leaves where sunlight filters in and a being emerges. The soft spotlight in the gallery suggests as much. Before our eyes, artists like Lee have ‘un-concealed’ these beings which in whole constitute the world and we viewers cannot help but pay respectful attention.

I felt like crying while attending to the work of Mono-ha. All the artists within the group differ in their approach. The grandfather work of Mono-ha by Nobuo Sekine is a column of dirt standing next to the hole from which it was dug up by hand. Susumu Koshimizu puts boulders inside a giant paper pouch. Yet, all of them reduce me, the viewer, into a state of awe and semi-acquiescence. Lee hopes to give his viewers a new perspective on an uncertain world, a world mystified by these ideas and stories we made up. Who am I to think of myself as individual and superior, as different and alone? What am I to a boulder, a rock, a pole, an iron plate?

Nobuo Sekine, Phase – Mother Earth I — 1968, Earth, cement — Nobuo Sekine, *Phase – Mother Earth I —* 1968, Earth, cement

Art is not separated from the environment, but is it separated from the historical moment? Some detractors of Mono-ha may think so about the apparent apolitical nature of these paintings and sculptures. Certainly, these artists are aware of the elemental world but what purpose does their art serve for our collective struggles? Budding in 1960s Japan, one can contextualise them as rebels against the intensifying industrialisation of the post-war miracle. But in the context of now, are we not desperate for coherence with nature? Is their restraint not a political strategy? Evoking Heidegger, Lee admonishes both our ignorance of things as they are and our consequent needless attempts to disrupt with our will. Perhaps, in the vain grab for production and gratification, we desert our distinctive duty of attention to the universe that breeds us.

These are questions I hope to continue to ponder. Looking at things and standing on the sand, I remind myself of my place in this material world.

ST.ART does not own the rights to any images used in this article.