One of the great quiet voices of contemporary art is coming to Cologne. The South Korean artist Lee Ufan is the recipient of the 32nd Wolfgang Hahn Prize, awarded by the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst at Museum Ludwig. The public award ceremony takes place on Friday, 6 November 2026, at 6:30 pm in the museum, and admission is free.
Six decades of stone, steel and space
Born in 1936 and living in Kamakura, Japan, Lee has spent more than sixty years exploring the relationships between people, material and space. His work stages encounters between opposites – stillness and movement, emptiness and presence – and lets the tension between them unfold. Many visitors know his installations in which a natural boulder meets an industrial steel plate: nothing is carved or decorated, yet the placement alone changes how the room feels.
A founding figure of Mono-ha
Lee is a defining figure of Mono-ha, the “School of Things” that emerged in Japan in the late 1960s. Its artists gave central importance to objects themselves and to how they act on one another, rather than to images or symbols. In the museum’s words, Lee’s practice aims to make the world experienceable not as a sum of isolated objects but as a network of relationships.
Painting with a single gesture
Internationally, Lee became especially well known for the painting he has developed since the 1970s. His series built from repeated or single brushstrokes, often in soft blue-grey tones on large white grounds, turn the act of painting into a measured breath. They are minimal, but never cold: each mark carries the rhythm of the body that made it.
A prize with a collection in mind
The Wolfgang Hahn Prize is named after the Cologne collector and restorer Wolfgang Hahn and has a special twist: it is linked to an acquisition for Museum Ludwig’s collection, so each laureate leaves a lasting trace in the city. Previous editions have regularly honoured artists whose influence was already international, and Lee fits that pattern perfectly.
After the ceremony, a presentation of Lee’s work will be on view at Museum Ludwig from 7 November 2026 to 4 April 2027. For anyone who has only seen his stones in photographs, it is a chance to experience in person how much a single object, carefully placed, can say.