Lee Ufan: How paintings 'devoid of being' have become auction favorites

When Korean-born Lee Ufan returned to Seoul in the early 70s, and met a group of like-minded painters, the country was ruled by a military dictatorship with
a chokehold on freedom of expression.

Under these conditions, Lee and his compatriots developed a particular form of "negation." They held an ambition to reduce artistic creation to its fundamental elements, that Lee says reminded him of the Japanese artists who he had spent the 1960s shoulder-to-shoulder with in Tokyo.

"Within this context these artists were expressing something that was devoid of being," explains Lee, now 79-years-old and the movement's best known alumnus, "and which neither represented an image or a message."

Instead, Lee would paint single-color abstract paintings using repetitive processes -- slowly dragging lines down a canvas or dotting the paint-soaked brush against its surface until the paint ran out. The group, many of whom painted monochrome canvases, earned the name Tansaekhwa (or "Dansaekhwa") -- sometimes translated as "the school of white."