Retaining plenitude: Lee Ufan and the ‘Indistinct’

ABSTRACT

I address the perceptual phenomenon of indistinctness and its connection to abstract concepts. The paradox that interests me is how a situation of diminished clarity and ambiguity problematizes and undermines normal vision while making way for another kind of seeing and knowing where we seem to inhabit a slippery moment of change or action, and are engaged in mobile, transitory and spontaneous negotiations of space and time. My discussion relates to the shift in theory and practice towards the exploration of the elusive middle, in-between or nondichotomous relation. Applying conceptual metaphor theory, I argue that the ‘indistinct’ serves the function of experiential ‘source domain’ for the abstract ‘target domain’ concepts of non-duality, limitlessness, infinity and existential immersion. I use a comparative methodology by exploring intercultural aesthetics and draw attention to an alternative paradigm. I look at a recursive orientation in which the ‘indistinct’ carries a more positive ontological value: the East Asian. I connect this cultural orientation to the evidence supplied by psychology and the neurosciences, asking what we might learn by considering the ‘indistinct’ as it is construed from within a ‘scopic regime’ more appreciative of its cognitive value. Through focusing on the work of the Korean artist Lee Ufan, I ask how we might then perceive differently the cultural paradigm from within which we have learned to see the world?

KEYWORDS:

• East Asian culture
• conceptual metaphor theory
• visuality
• liminality
• hybridity
• multiculturalism
• Lee Ufan
• François Jullien
• contemporary painting

Notes on contributor

Simon Morley is an artist and writer. He is the author of Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art (2003), editor of The Sublime: Documents in Contemporary Art (2010) and author of Seven Keys to Modern and Contemporary Art (forthcoming from Thames & Hudson, 2019). He is currently writing a book on the monochrome from a global perspective, to be published by Reaktion Books. His writings have recently appeared in Third Text, World Art and The Journal of Contemporary Painting. He is an Assistant Professor at Dankook University, Republic of Korea. His contact address is: [email protected]. His artwork can be viewed at: www.simonmorley.com.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In my translation from the French, ‘in-between’ is a rendering of ‘l’entre-deux’ – or literally, ‘between-two’ – which, in its turn, as Lee Ufan informed me via email, is a translation of his original Japanese, ‘ma’, which can also be translated as ‘interval’, ‘gap’, ‘space’, ‘void’, ‘negative space’, ‘pause’, ‘timing’, ‘among’. The key point is that ‘in-between’ in this sense carries both objective and subjective significance, linking space and time. See: Richard B. Pilgrim (1986).

2 Jullien stresses the ‘otherness’ of ‘Chinese’ and, what he calls ‘Greek’ culture, seeing the apparent alterity of Chinese thought as signifying absolute difference. The assertion of such radical difference has been challenged, most especially by Jean-François Billeter. See Jean-François (2006).

3 See Erin McCarthy (2011). McCarthy writes: ‘The idea of betweenness and a Zen Buddhist “not one, not two” that is neither a celebration of multiplicity nor a static absolute is, I believe, one different type of thinking that might allow for the kind of selfhood, relationality, and ethics that she [Irigaray] seeks’ (225).