The island of Naoshima used to be heavily polluted and dominated by a Mitsubishi plant. Now, after being redeveloped by the billionaire Sōichirō Fukutake in 1989, it’s known as Japan’s “art island”. Boasting 3,000 inhabitants and rising up out of Seto Inland Sea, the island is studded with dim, concrete-walled galleries sunk into the hillsides. Designed by architect Tadao Andō, these have a contemplative, almost worshipful ambience and are filled with extraordinary paintings, sculptures and installations by artists ranging from Claude Monet to land artist Walter De Maria, although the real Instagram bait is the giant yellow-and-black spotted pumpkin deposited on a pier by Yayoi Kusama in 1994.
As all the retired American couples treating themselves to a trip of a lifetime would attest, Naoshima has become the ultimate destination for those seeking a transcendental visual experience. For many, this comes as they walk downhill to the coast and see a huge steel arch, 11m tall and 13m wide, pinned between two sand-coloured boulders. Underneath it is a long steel plate acting as a kind of runway, enticing visitors to walk through the arch towards the sea.
The sculpture – called Porte Vers l’Infini, or Gate to Infinity – seems to intensify the beautify of its surroundings. The sky appears bluer, the birdsong louder, the pine tree-covered hills lusher and more dramatic. As its creator, Korea-born artist Lee Ufan, says at his studio in the coastal city of Kamakura back on the mainland the following day: “I want my work to take you to a place where you can feel the deep breath of the universe.”
The artist, who is respectfully referred to as “Mr Lee” by those around him, turns 90 next month. As well as having two museums dedicated to him, one in Naoshima and another in Arles, France, he is about to open two major shows. In Venice, to coincide with the Biennale, he has a retrospective covering his career from the late 1960s to the present. It will include early sculptures he made as part of the Mono-ha movement. Mono-ha, which roughly translates as School of Things, were interested in the way objects relate to one another in nature. They are often compared to the American land artists, post-minimalists and the Italian arte povera school, whose favourite materials were soil, rock and sand.
“I was in my early 30s,” Lee says. “At that time, in the late 60s, America, Europe, and Japan were in a period of rebellion.” His first 3D work – titled Phenomenon and Perception B but now, like his other sculptures, retitled Relatum – was a pane of glass that had been cracked by the weight of a boulder. It was a nod to Marcel Duchamp, an exploration of the clash between industry and nature. “In the beginning,” says Lee, “my work wasn’t about being slow or quiet. It was more about violence and resistance.”
Lee didn’t always use heavy objects: in one 1969 work, then called Things and Words, Lee chased three enormous sheets of paper being blown around a square in front of Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum on a windy day. “I wanted to show how we have a dialogue with material,” Lee says. “Over time, the paper gets wrinkled and I become exhausted.” The work was named after Michel Foucault’s book Les Mots et les Choses, philosophy providing one of Lee’s primary inspirations. Did people understand what he was trying to do? “Maybe not.”
The day before his Venice show opens, Dia Beacon in upstate New York will display eight works: three sculptures and five paintings, some from the 1970s series From Line, in which meticulously straight stripes are painted down or across the canvas, fading as the dark blue oil paint runs out. (Lee had to stop making these physically challenging works in the 1980s as his hand had started to tremble too much.) Others are from the 90s series With Winds, in which the lines swirl.
Eight works might not seem like much for an exhibition, but there are only 17 in the entire Lee Ufan Museum in Naoshima – and it’s forbidden to photograph the ones inside. Although he doesn’t regard himself as a minimalist, Lee stands against the idea of overproduction, in both art and in life, and is a master at paring things down. He once said: “I want viewers to perceive the things I did not paint as much as the things I did.”
At Naoshima, the visitor’s experience concludes in a room with a curved white ceiling and a pale wooden floor. Shoes must be removed, then you’re invited to sit down and contemplate three works painted directly on to the wall, part of Lee’s Dialogue series. Each features a lozenge of grey paint that goes from a paler to a darker shade. Although it looks like one simple brushstroke, it’s made up of many much smaller ones, built up over a week, with each layer allowed to dry before another is applied. It’s deeply calming to slow down and examine the way the grey line crumbles into the white paint underneath, sensing how meticulous human care has struck a balance with natural human imperfection. “My work is very powerful,” Lee says. “It’s not my power, but it’s a vibration that happens in the relationship with the person who views it.”
The following day, three other journalists and I take a train to Kamakura, an hour from Tokyo, then a bus to Lee’s studio. It takes slightly longer than anticipated, meaning we’re in danger of being a few minutes late. Lee’s studio manager starts running frantically up the hill and exhorts us to do the same. It’s unclear as to whether this is due to the general Japanese taboo around lateness, or because Mr Lee specifically hates it. But he greets us cheerfully as he emerges from the door into a gravel garden where more of his sculptures are placed – including curving pieces of rusted steel next to a boulder.
Lee is wearing jeans, black leather slippers and a rust-coloured quarter-zip knit under a grey cardigan. He looks nowhere near his great age. “I just work hard,” Lee says when I ask for the secret of his youthfulness. “I call myself a nomad – I travel a lot, visiting many other places and meeting many people. I still don’t understand the world and I want to know more. That probably gives me energy to stay young.”
He rises at 7am every day, walks for an hour, goes to buy fresh vegetables and has acupuncture. When he wants to start painting, he does breath exercises to get in the zone. “I always have 10 to 15 minutes of tuning my breath, then trying to achieve quietness, to calm down my body. In a way, I think I’m using the silence as a medium.”
Before being interviewed, Lee sits everyone down with tea, served in cups and saucers that bear his unmistakeable brush stroke. The studio has brushes of every conceivable thickness to hand, and there are shelves full of books on artists including Richard Serra, Jasper Johns and the land art movement. Lee’s From Line paintings hang on the walls – and in the loo. I’m joined by an interpreter and one of the artist’s three daughters. Later, he ruefully suggests that he hasn’t always been the greatest husband and father. “I think my family had to make some sacrifices for my work,” he says. “I always talk about connecting to nature and through that, connecting to the art. But then I am, in a way, self-centred, so there’s an irony in that.”
Lee was born in Kyongsang-namdo, a mountain village in Korea in 1936, when the nation was occupied by the Japanese – an occupation that concluded when Japan was defeated in the second world war, although a brutal civil war followed, leading to the partitioning of the country. As a child, Lee excelled in poetry, art, calligraphy and music, studying the last at university in Seoul, keen to become a composer.
At 20, he was asked to take some medicine to an uncle who lived in Japan, and stayed to study philosophy at Nihon University in Tokyo. He began to make art that, he says, was severely criticised from the word go, so he became a critic, too: “I started to write as a way to defend myself.” After being astonished by a work called Phase: Mother Earth by Nobuo Sekine, which displayed an 8ft tall column of earth in Kobe’s Simu Rikyu Park next to the 8ft deep hole it had been dug from, he joined Mono-ha. As well as his art, he has written 17 books on philosophy, poetry and art history.
His international reputation grew, but in 1970 the organisers of a festival of Japanese art in New York barred him because he was born in Korea, showing the enduring enmity between the two countries. “I was a bit hurt,” Lee says. “But I felt I needed to seek out ways to communicate with people who have opposite positions.” Today he values his internationalist vantage point, unconfined by borders: a Korean in Japan, who speaks several languages and also has a home in Paris.
People may puzzle over the choice of his boulders, their careful placement on the ground, the enigmatic qualities of a large concrete pole displayed on a bed of pebbles at the entrance to his museum. Nonetheless, they have an undeniable impact, serving as conduits to deeper contemplation. Lee says his work expresses something about the relationships between the interior and the exterior, about the awareness of our bodies in nature, and of finding our essential selves amid so much noise. “My work always bridges to something,” he says. “Being open to connecting with others is so important.”
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Lee Ufan is at Dia:Beacon, Upstate New York, from 8 May and at SMAC, Venice, from 9 May to 22 November. Flights and accommodation were paid by the Dia foundation