Renowned Korean contemporary artist Lee Ufan has been selected as the recipient of the 32nd Wolfgang Hahn Prize, awarded by the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. This marks the second time a Korean artist has received the award, following Haegue Yang’s win in 2018.
 
Established in 1994, the Wolfgang Hahn Prize honors one internationally acclaimed contemporary artist each year. Past recipients include Francis Alÿs (2023) and Cindy Sherman (1997), and in 2018, Haegue Yang became the first Asian woman to receive the prize.

Born in Seoul in 1936 and moving to Japan at the age of 20, Lee Ufan became a leading figure of Mono-ha, the Japanese minimalist movement that emerged in Tokyo in the late 1960s. He sought an art that “restructures the framework of thought” by reconfiguring the relationships between objects and the world. Beginning in the late 1960s, he maintained active exchanges with the Korean art scene, exerting significant influence on the development of experimental art and Dansaekhwa in the 1970s.

This year’s guest juror, Mami Kataoka, Director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, offered the following statement: “Over the sixty-year trajectory of his artistic practice, he has pursued the essential meaning of existence across all relationships that transcend East and West, neither following Western modernism nor being bound by Eastern spiritual traditions.”
 
Following the award ceremony on November 6, 2026, an exhibition of Lee Ufan’s work will open at the Museum Ludwig from November 7 through April 4. Meanwhile, in the garden of the Hoam Art Museum, Lee Ufan’s new series ‘Silentium’ is currently on permanent display.

References

• 갤러리현대 보도자료 (Gallery Hyundai Press Release)
• 호암미술관, 이우환 <실렌티움(묵시암)> (Hoan Museum of Art, Lee Ufan, Silentium (Muksiam))
• 뉴시스, 이우환, 독일 ‘볼프강 한상’ 수상…한국작가, 양혜규 이어 두 번째, 2025.11.27