Cut Up

Cut Up is part of Lee Ufan’s groundbreaking series of the same name that began in the late 1960s and ended in 1974. At the time, Lee was the key theorist of and participant in Mono-ha (School of Things), a group in Japan that made sculptural interventions to explore the relationship between material and space, a practice deeply informed by East Asian aesthetics; at the same time, he was also contemplating a return to painting. The year before making this work, during his first visit to New York, Lee saw Barnett Newman’s Concord at Newman’s Museum of Modern Art retrospective, which influenced Lee’s use of minimal marks to register maximum effect. For Cut Up, Lee incised the wood surface repeatedly in one direction with a chisel. The cuts of varied depths all over the composition create a field of suspended flaps whose volume, shape, and shadow activate the space around them. These disruptions on the flat surface emphasize material over gesture and ultimately push the definitions of mark-making, painting, and sculpture.