Book, 2019, Denys Riout, Collectif
The Challenging Souls - Yves Klein, Lee Ufan, Ding Yi
Yves Klein represented the genius of the French avant-garde scene in the 1950s and 1960s. Lee Ufan contributed a conceptual framework and practice to the Mono-ha (School of Things) movement of the late 1960s to early 1970s of Japan and he is also a keen advocate for the Dansaekhwa (monochrome painting) movement that emerged in the 1970s in Korea. Ding Yi has been known since the 1980s for his abstract paintings built up of crosses, a culmination of Chinese contemporary art post the cultural cum political turmoils of the 1960s to 1970s.
These three artists have transcended boundaries of time and space. This collaboration opens a new appraisal of experimental art movement in the second half of the 20th century, between the west and the east, which is still going on. The Challenging Souls: Yves Klein, Lee Ufan, Ding Yi is not only a retrospective to art history, but also a special project beyond the exhibition. The picture album includes a long foreword In The Name of Avant-garde written by curators Gong Yan and Yongwoo Lee; It also invites internationally renowned art critics and curators like Denys Riout, Jean-Marie Gallais, Tony Godfrey and Hou Hanru to write influential reviews. The picture album records all aspects of the exhibition through hundreds of photos of the exhibition site, creation and life photos of the artists, as well as documents, archives, and art works which exhibit delicate details. In The Name of Avant-garde, the timeless gravity of avant-garde leads us to focus on the most dynamic experimental art scenes.