Lee Ufan in the gardens of Versailles

Lee Ufan, the Korean-born cofounder and theorist of Japan’s late-1960s and early-’70s Mono-ha (School of Things) movement, has temporarily installed 10 new sculptures from his long-running “Relatum” series at the royal palace of Versailles. The enigmatic works – nine of them sited in the chateau’s immense formal gardens – feature Lee’s signature counterbalancing of stone, steel and other materials.

Shadow of the Stars, for example, comprises a segmented fence of upright steel plates surrounding a circle of crushed-marble gravel and seven boulders arranged like the heavenly bodies of a constellation. The Giant’s Club, a long steel rod leaning across an enormous stone, serves as a metaphor for the standoff between wild nature and the human impulse to impose order.

Conversely, a pervasive, almost Romantic natural sympathy is suggested by Wind Blades, a sequence of wavelike metal plates laid out sequentially on the central lawn to recall the wind-on-the-grass ripples that Lee, 78, observed on one of his numerous preparatory visits to Versailles.

In The Tomb: Homage to André Le Nôtre, a severe rectangular pit containing a boulder confronts the phantasmagoric Baths of Apollo fountain, with its three mythical figure groups set in an artificial grotto. The landscape architect Le Nôtre (1613-1700) is famed for transforming, at the behest of Louis XIV, some 16,000 acres of swampland into Versailles’s rigorously geometric gardens and park, only occasionally punctuated by such frothy statuary outbreaks.

Lee’s The Arch of Versailles  is a simple, vaulting steel arc some 100 feet high and wide, that—depending on one’s angle of view – reframes the palace, the long central lawn and/or the sky itself. Seemingly held in bent tension by two bracketing rocks, it was inspired, Lee says, by a rainbow that he saw as a young man while living in Japan.

While fully aware of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Arte Povera and Land art in the West, the artist resolutely committed himself to an Eastern artistic practice based on contemplation, restraint and thoughtful pacing. For him, the control of breath, brush, energy and formal rhythm are intimately interrelated.

All of this makes Lee a particularly intriguing choice for the Versailles commission; he seeks to disclose a transcendent order that he believes is already there. The Cartesian cogito (“I think; therefore, I am”), which lies at the heart of the French rationalist tradition, is linked in his artwork and writings to the isolate, all-discovering meditation of the Eastern sage.