[4] His writings, published in rapid succession from 1969, have sought to externalize the interface between ideas and sensibilities from the West, namely Western Europe and the United States, and those found in East Asia.

[6] As a painter, Lee contributed to "Korean Monotone Art" (Dansaekjo Yesul, 單色調 藝術),[citation needed] the first artistic movement in 20th century Korea to be promoted in Japan.

[8] Raised by his parents and Confucian grandfather, Lee's first exposure to visual art was through inkbrush painting, in which he received instruction as a child, and later as a high school student in Seoul.

"[7] Lee states that he had always favored literature over painting and was a bookworm by nature, reading extensively in a wide variety of fields, including philosophy, culture, and art.

[10] Nonetheless, in 1956, Lee began studying painting at the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University, one of Korea's most prestigious schools of higher learning.

[11] In 1969, Lee wrote the essay "From Object to Being," applying his philosophical principles to aesthetic concerns, which was then counted as one of the major critical studies opening up an international dialogue for Japanese modern art.

Careful to place his emphasis on "things" rather than "concepts," he would have his students ponder the movement of their hand, the possibilities of gestures, or the perception of phenomena while grasping a pencil, crushing paper, or twisting clay, as well as the dynamics of one's relationship to space (outdoor/indoor, public/living).

Lee, not only due to his artistic practice but owing as well to the translation of his writings into French, has maintained a high profile particularly in France and Germany, where he has spent half his time since the 1980s.

[23] Lee's professional success in Japan additionally overlapped with a period of the 1970s described retrospectively as fukakujitsusei no jidai, or the "age of uncertainty," a term borrowed from economist Kenneth Galbraith's book of the same name.

[24] Lee describes the period of hyper-accelerated industrialization in Europe as well as Japan in the second half of the 1960s, the May 1968 student protests in Paris, and the countercultural movement in New York around 1967 and 1968 as catalysts for discussions regarding artistic production and the act of making.

[26] In 1970, Lee moderated a seminal roundtable discussion with artist Sekine Nobuo, and Tama Art University colleagues Koshimizu Susumu, Narita Katsuhiko, Suga Kishio, and Yoshida Katsuro titled "Mono Opens a New World."

This roundtable accompanied the publication of Sekine Nobuo's Phase—Mother Earth (1868), considered the first Mono-ha artwork, in Bijutsu techō, in a section titled "Voices of Emerging Artists: From the Realm of Non-Art.

"[28] In its theoretical principles, the Mono-ha school of thought rejected Western notions of representation, choosing to focus on the relationships of materials and perceptions rather than on expression or intervention.

[19] Through their pedagogy and experiments, Lee and fellow Mono-ha artists shared an attitude toward phenomena that was tested through serial composition, emphasizing the development of works over time.

[33] For example, in a work titled Relatum, first produced in 1968 and reproduced in 2010, Lee dropped a rock from a small height on to a square mirror laid over a steel plate.

[31] In another work, formerly titled Things and Words (1969), three large sheets of blank paper were left in a public plaza to blow about in the wind, inviting the natural forces to co-author the installation, in a dialogue of the human and non-human.

[23] However, some of Lee's most representative work began with the early painting series From Point and From Line (1972–84), first exhibited in 1973 at the Tokyo Gallery under Yamamoto Takashi, who was known for promoting the latest in Japanese, European, and American contemporary art.

[37] Lending an alternative interpretation on the work was the Japanese art critic Minemura Toshiaki, who argued that the paintings needed to be seen durationally, as a depiction of time, rather than records of spatial placement.

[38] Though he never actually used the term, Minemura's interpretation strongly implied the From Line and From Point series to be more akin to video-based works, rather than to the medium of painting.

[39]In sculpture, Lee explored similar formal interests using minimal means: typically, he favored stone and sheets of iron, though he employed cotton, glass and wood during the Mono-ha period.

[42] In the mid-1970s Lee introduced Korean five artists whom called later Dansaekzo Whehwa (Monotone Painting) school to Japan,[citation needed] which offered a fresh approach to abstraction by presenting repetitive gestural marks as bodily records of time's perpetual passage.

[12] In 1991 Lee began his series of Correspondence paintings, which consist of just one or two grey-blue brushstrokes, made of a mixture of oil and crushed stone pigment to intensify the color, applied onto a large white surface.

[14] These works reflect Lee's concept of the "art of encounter," which plays out in the negotiation between formal control and unpredictable nature of the minerals, and is dramatized by the artist's emphasis on gesture and its self-extinction.

[41] From his first solo exhibition in Japan in 1967, Lee Ufan was invited by Manfred Schneckenburger to participate in Documenta VI (1977) in Kassel, Germany, and in 1969 and 1973 he represented Korea in the Bienal de São Paulo.

The Situation Kunst (für Max Imdahl), a museum associated with Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, opened in 2006 with a gallery devoted to a permanent installation of Lee Ufan's paintings and a garden of his sculpture.

[14] In 2011, Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity was exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, organized by curator Alexandra Munroe, with over 90 works, from the 1960s to the present.

In 2014, Lee was the seventh guest artist selected for the contemporary art program of the Palace of Versailles,[51] following Jeff Koons in 2008, Xavier Veilhan in 2009, Takashi Murakami in 2010, Bernar Venet in 2011, Joana Vasconcelos in 2012, and Giuseppe Penone in 2013.

[52] The exhibition, titled Lee Ufan: Open Dimension, took shape around 10 site-specific sculptures in the Relatum series, responding to the museum's Brutalist cylindrical design and human relations to nature.

[41] Placed within the context of his peers who developed Minimal, Postminimal, and Land art practices contemporaneously, such as Michael Heizer, Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, and Michelle Stuart, this presentation of Lee's work at Dia aimed to investigate the formal, material, and conceptual relationships between these artists.