Lee Ufan Prices: Canvas at Six Times Paper, and Large Canvases Down a Third Since 2022
How Lee Ufan paints, what the 2016 forgery case settled and did not, and what 585 lots sold at Korean auction between 2022 and 2026 show: canvas at six times paper, large canvases down a third, and twelve matched print groups that all fell.
Lee Ufan turned 90 in June 2026. Dia Art Foundation marked it with two shows, a new installation at Dia Beacon in May and eight galleries at SMAC Venice as a collateral event of the Venice Biennale, and Avignon gave him the Palais des Papes from July. In those same months the most expensive Lee Ufan to sell at Korean auction all year went under its low estimate, and a three metre canvas that K Auction offered in February at up to $1,789,896 does not appear in the sold record at all.
His Korean record is still 3.1 billion won, about $2,311,949, for East Winds (1984) at Seoul Auction on 24 August 2021, the first time a living Korean artist passed 3 billion won at auction. Of the 585 Lee Ufan lots that sold at Korean auction from January 2022 to August 2026, exactly one got past half of that figure.
This piece is about what those 585 lots are made of. All figures are hammer prices from K-artmarket records of Korean sales, converted at 1,340.86 won to the dollar, the rate in my tracker on 9 September 2026. Unsold lots are not in the data, so everything below describes work that found a buyer.
Who he is
Lee was born in Haman, South Gyeongsang province, on 24 June 1936, and learned inkbrush and calligraphy as a child. He entered the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University, moved to Japan in 1956 at twenty, and took a philosophy degree at Nihon University in Tokyo in 1961. He taught at Tama Art University from 1973 to 2007 and works in Kamakura and Paris.
He became known for writing before he became known for painting. The theory of Mono-ha comes out of essays he published between 1968 and 1971, starting with a piece on Sekine Nobuo's Phase-Mother Earth, a cylinder of soil dug out of the ground and stacked beside the hole it came from. Lee read it not as sculpture but as the world being shown as it already is. The essay is now known as Beyond Being and Nothingness. From Object to Being followed in 1969, and Tabata Shoten published the book In Search of Encounter: At the Dawn of a New Art in Tokyo on 25 January 1971.
Mono-ha sets stone, steel, glass and earth in a space with almost nothing done to them, so that the work is the relation between the things and the place rather than anything the artist added. That is what the sculptures are called: Relatum, a Latin word for one of the two terms in a relation. In 2005 the Yokohama Museum of Art titled his show The Art of Margins, after the word that runs through his writing. Yohaku, the unpainted part, is not empty space for him but resonant space.
He won the UNESCO Prize at the Shanghai Biennale in 2000, the Ho-Am Prize and the Praemium Imperiale for painting in 2001, the Legion of Honour in 2007 and the Order of the Rising Sun in 2009.
How the paintings are made
The pigment is mineral, ground stone mixed with animal glue and oil into something thick, the way East Asian painting has used stone colour for centuries. The canvas goes on the floor. The brush is loaded once. Then he marks, dot after dot or one long line, and keeps going until the loaded brush gives out, so the mark starts dense and thins to nothing.
Jean-Marie Gallais, curator of the Centre Pompidou-Metz show, put the two early series in one line in a text his Paris gallery Mennour published: "Lines executed in single strokes, slowly extending to the edge of the canvas, like long breaths." The same text calls the paint a thick mix of mineral pigment, oil and glue, and every stroke unique, irreversible and indelible. Lee traces the gesture to learning calligraphy as a child in Korea, where children are told to make dots or lines until the ink disappears.
What matters commercially is that none of it can be corrected. He is trying to repeat the previous mark and cannot, and the gap between the intention and the result is what stays on the canvas. In the later series, where a whole three metre canvas carries one or two strokes, most of the working time is the breathing before the stroke rather than the stroke.
The sculpture narrowed through the 1970s to two materials, stone and steel plate, which are not opposites so much as two states of the same thing: the steel plate is mineral dug out of the ground and rolled in a factory. He leaves both more or less as they are and arranges them for the room they are in.
The 2016 forgery case
Anyone buying this artist should know this before they know the exhibition history.
In 2016 the police investigated Lee Ufan forgeries sold through Insa-dong galleries in Seoul in 2012 and 2013, seized thirteen paintings, and had them examined. The National Forensic Service found them to be forgeries and the prosecution reached the same conclusion. Lee said all thirteen were his own work, painted with his own breathing, rhythm and colour. As Seoul Shinmun reported, the police answered that they had found a marble pigment he had told them he never used, and Lee said the police had offered to settle on four of the thirteen being fakes.
The courts sided with the forensic finding. On 18 January 2017 the Seoul Central District Court gave a gallery operator four years, the painter who made the fakes three years suspended for five, and an antiques dealer seven years. On 24 August 2017 the same court gave another gallery-owning painter seven years and the painter who copied the work and forged the signature three years.
The lesson for a buyer is that the artist's own word was not the end of it. His authentication and the laboratory's finding and the court's ruling came apart, in public, over the same thirteen canvases. It is one reason the auction record below is worth reading closely: an auction lot carries a provenance and a catalogue entry, which is a different kind of object from a painting with a story attached to it.
What I took out first
Lee Ufan sells across five kinds of object, and the aggregate median of all of them together means nothing. Before any of the numbers below, I removed three things from the K-artmarket extract of 614 rows.
Twenty-six lots are posters, art prints sold as merchandise, an umbrella, and porcelain tableware, between $75 and $2,536. Three lots are the same works entered twice: at Seoul Auction's 186th sale on 23 September 2025, a From Line canvas and two other unique works each appear as two rows with identical title, size, medium and price. A unique painting cannot sell twice in one session, so I counted each once. I have not compared the auction photographs side by side, which is the check that would settle it.
Six more lots are excluded from anything involving size, because they are multiple works catalogued as one lot. The clearest is a Correspondance at K Auction on 29 March 2023 that made $969,527: it is four paintings of 145.5x112.1cm each, not one.
That leaves 585 lots: 164 unique works on canvas or paper, 350 prints, 70 ceramics and sculptures, and one lot whose medium field is blank. Three of them are from Seoul Auction's sales in Hong Kong, kept because they are a Korean house's record.
One house name is corrected. Two lots from an 'EVENING SALE' on 24 November 2025, the With Winds at $678,669 and a Correspondance at $395,269, are filed under K Auction in K-artmarket. It was Seoul Auction's evening sale, which Daily Art's report of that night confirms, putting the With Winds at "9억 1000만원에 낙찰되며", sold at 910 million won.
The record prices, in Korea and abroad
Lee Ufan's top prices only make sense side by side, wherever they were set. These are the lots I could confirm at 1.5 billion won or more, from press reports and the auction record. For 2015 to mid 2019 I used a Newsis ranking compiled from the Korean houses, and from 2022 the full K-artmarket record. Everything else, Korean sales before 2015 and from mid 2019 through 2021 and foreign sales in general, is only what press reports turned up, so some lots will be missing. Won figures are converted at the article's rate of 1,340.86, which is not the rate on the day for the older sales; where the original currency was reported, it is given.
| Price | Basis | Work | Size | Sale | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $2,311,949 (3.1 billion won) | Not stated | East Winds, 1984 | 181x224cm | Seoul Auction, Seoul | 24 Aug 2021 |
| $1,767,522 (2.37 billion won) | Not stated | From Line | Not stated | Sotheby's New York | 2014 |
| $1,640,738 (2.2 billion won) | Not stated | From Point, two works, 1975 | Not stated | Seoul Auction, Seoul | 22 Jun 2021 |
| $1,536,700 (HK$13,500,000) | Not stated | East Winds, 1984 | 181x224cm | Seoul Auction, Hong Kong | 5 Oct 2019 |
| $1,420,684 | With premium | From Line No. 790372, 1979 | 135.2x166.8cm | Phillips Hong Kong | 22 Jun 2022 |
| HK$11,265,000 | Not stated | Dialogue, 2020 | 227.5x182cm | Christie's Hong Kong | Late May 2023 |
| $1,263,312 | With premium | From Line, 1978 | 130.5x162cm | Christie's Hong Kong | 27 Mar 2026 |
| $1,239,399 (1.66 billion won) | Not stated | With Winds, 1990 | 161.5x227cm | Seoul Auction, Hong Kong | 24 Mar 2017 |
| $1,193,264 | Hammer | Dialogue, 2019 | 291x218cm | Seoul Auction, Seoul | 27 May 2025 |
| $1,128,336 (1.51 billion won) | Not stated | From Point, 1976 | 161.5x129.5cm | Seoul Auction, Hong Kong | 27 May 2018 |
| $1,118,685 (1.5 billion won) | Not stated | From Point No. 760162, 1976 | 162.2x130.3cm | K Auction, Seoul | 18 Oct 2017 |
| $1,118,685 | Hammer | From Point, 1980 | 181x227cm | K Auction, Seoul | 24 Jun 2026 |
Three things to carry into the table. The basis is mixed, and where a report did not say whether a figure includes the buyer's premium I have left it as not stated; a foreign figure that does not end in round thousands, like the Christie's HK$11,265,000, usually does. The two East Winds rows are the same painting: it sold at Seoul Auction's Hong Kong sale in October 2019 and came back to Seoul Auction in Seoul less than two years later, the Seoul Economic Daily and the Hankook Ilbo both report, and the Hankook Ilbo adds that Christie's hung it in Hong Kong in May 2024 as a loan, not for sale. The sources are the Financial News for the 2014 New York and June 2021 lots, Newsis for the 2019 East Winds, a 2019 Newsis ranking for the three 2017 and 2018 lots, Edaily for the 2023 Dialogue, THE VALUE for Phillips and Christie's 2026, and K-artmarket for the 2025 and 2026 Seoul sales.
What follows under this table is interpretation.
The records were made by the Korean houses. Eight of the twelve are Seoul Auction or K Auction sales, three of them held by Seoul Auction in Hong Kong. The best foreign house result, Sotheby's New York in 2014, is still below East Winds. That is the reverse of Park Seo-Bo, whose record is a Sotheby's Hong Kong lot, and of Kim Whanki, whose record prices are Hong Kong and New York evening sales.
A house sends a painting to where its likeliest buyers are. Between 2017 and 2019 Seoul Auction took large With Winds and From Point canvases to Hong Kong rather than Seoul, to reach collectors who do not come to a Seoul saleroom. When the Korean market ran hot in 2021, the top came home: the painting that made 2.06 billion won in Hong Kong made 3.1 billion won in Seoul two years later.
The foreign houses sell the 1970s. Three of their four lots are From Line, and the two with a documented date are from 1978 and 1979. The exception, Christie's 2020 Dialogue, came with a name attached: Edaily reports that it drew attention as part of the collection of the property developer Gerald Fineberg. A recent painting in an evening sale seems to need a story of that kind to carry it.
The two 2021 records belong to 2021. Both were set at Seoul Auction that summer, and nothing in the five years since has passed 2 billion won. A record is the best night, not a price level.
Every lot at 900 million won and above
Fifteen lots from the period this article covers, January 2022 to August 2026, hammer prices, buyer's premium excluded. All are Seoul Auction or K Auction sales, and all but one were held in Seoul; the exception is a Seoul Auction sale in Hong Kong. A painting sold twice is counted twice. Years of execution are given only where a press report confirmed them, because the records themselves carry a year on three rows out of 585.
| Price | Work | Medium | Size | House | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $1,193,264 | Dialogue, 2019 | Acrylic on canvas | 291x218cm, 300 ho | Seoul Auction | 27 May 2025 |
| $1,118,685 | From Point, 1980 | Pigment on canvas | 181x227cm, 150 ho | K Auction | 24 Jun 2026 |
| $1,044,106 | With Winds | Oil and mineral pigment on canvas | 161.5x130cm, 100 ho | Seoul Auction | 26 Apr 2022 |
| $1,006,816 | With Winds | Oil and mineral pigment on canvas | 181x227.3cm, 150 ho | Seoul Auction | 28 Jun 2022 |
| $969,527 | Correspondance, four works | Pigment on canvas | 145.5x112.1cm each, 80 ho | K Auction | 29 Mar 2023 |
| $969,527 | Dialogue | Acrylic on canvas | 227x182cm, 150 ho | Seoul Auction, Hong Kong | 29 Nov 2022 |
| $894,948 | With Winds | Pigment on canvas | 227x181cm, 150 ho | K Auction | 22 Nov 2023 |
| $775,622 | Dialogue | Acrylic on canvas | 96x130cm, 60 ho | Seoul Auction | 28 May 2026 |
| $745,790 | Dialogue | Acrylic on canvas | 146x114cm, 80 ho | Seoul Auction | 26 Apr 2022 |
| $708,500 | Dialogue, 2008 | Oil and mineral pigment on canvas | 218x290cm, 300 ho | Seoul Auction | 26 Feb 2026 |
| $708,500 | With Winds S8708-5 | Pigment on canvas | 162x130cm, 100 ho | K Auction | 20 Mar 2024 |
| $678,669 | With Winds | Oil and mineral pigment on canvas | 130x161cm, 100 ho | Seoul Auction | 24 Nov 2025 |
| $671,211 | Dialogue | Oil and mineral pigment on canvas | 181x226cm, 150 ho | Seoul Auction | 27 Jun 2023 |
| $671,211 | From Line | Oil and mineral pigment on canvas | 91x116.5cm, 50 ho | Seoul Auction | 28 Jun 2022 |
| $671,211 | Dialogue | Acrylic on canvas | 145x113.8cm, 80 ho | Seoul Auction | 22 Mar 2022 |
All fifteen are canvas paintings. Not one work on paper, print or ceramic reaches this table, and nothing here comes close to the 2021 record.
Six of the fifteen sold in 2022, three in 2023, one in 2024, two in 2025 and three in 2026. The 2022 cluster has an ordinary explanation. Owners of large paintings consign when they expect competition, and 2021 was the year the Korean auction market ran hot and East Winds made 3.1 billion won. Paintings consigned in that mood reached the rooms in the first half of 2022. The single lot in 2024 is the same logic running the other way: in a falling market an owner of a major canvas has no reason to hurry.
None of the fifteen sold online. A painting at this level is placed deliberately, at the front of a major sale's catalogue and in its press release, and the houses compete for it: in February 2026 both of them put a 300 ho Dialogue into the same week. The Hong Kong lot is placement too. Seoul Auction sent a 150 ho Dialogue to the sale where overseas bidders who do not come to Seoul would see it, and it still made less than half of East Winds.
Canvas and paper are two different markets
| Support | Lots | Median | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Canvas | 96 | $281,536 | $63,392 to $1,193,264 |
| Paper | 68 | $44,747 | $1,492 to $111,868 |
The gap is more than six to one, and it holds inside every size band. Among works of 2,500 square centimetres or less, canvases run a median of $126,784 and works on paper $33,561. In the next band up it is $223,737 against $61,901.
The works on paper are watercolour, gouache, charcoal, conte and pencil, and most are catalogued as Untitled. Twelve of the 68 passed $74,579. The dearest was a 75x55cm From Point in watercolour, $111,868 in November 2024, and 88 of the 96 canvases beat it.
The market reads the support as a grade: canvas as the finished work meant for a wall, paper as something lighter, whatever the brush did. With Lee there is a second reason. As the series table below shows, his prices lean on which series a painting belongs to, and a sheet called Untitled carries no series in its title. It is probably not chance that the dearest work on paper was the one sold under a series name.
Bigger canvases, cheaper per unit
Korean catalogues size canvases in ho, a standard frame scale where 100 ho is roughly 162x130cm. Ho only applies to canvas, so works on paper are left out of this table.
| Size | Lots | Median | Per ho |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 ho and under | 24 | $126,784 | $12,678 |
| 20 ho | 13 | $223,737 | $11,187 |
| 30 ho | 15 | $231,195 | $7,706 |
| 40 to 50 ho | 13 | $302,045 | $6,712 |
| 60 to 80 ho | 8 | $440,016 | $6,286 |
| 100 ho and over | 20 | $667,482 | $6,675 |
The total rises with size and the unit price falls, which is ordinary: fewer people can take a three metre painting. A price only climbs at auction when at least two people want the same lot. A 10 ho canvas fits a living room. A painting over 100 ho needs someone with several hundred thousand dollars and a wall close to two metres wide, which narrows the room to companies, institutions and a few very large houses. Fewer bidders means less competition, and less competition means price does not keep pace with size. What is not ordinary is how weakly size predicts price once you leave the table.
The series matters more than the size
| Series | Lots | Median | Median area | Highest |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dialogue | 13 | $671,211 | 21,060cm2 | $1,193,264 |
| From Line | 9 | $298,316 | 3,445cm2 | $671,211 |
| From Point | 11 | $287,129 | 4,320cm2 | $1,118,685 |
| With Winds | 22 | $261,026 | 6,603cm2 | $1,044,106 |
| Correspondance | 27 | $246,111 | 8,030cm2 | $484,764 |
| Untitled or series not identifiable | 8 | $227,466 | 6,516cm2 | $447,474 |
| From Winds | 3 | $137,971 | 1,900cm2 | $175,261 |
Read the From Line row against the Correspondance row. The From Line canvases are less than half the size and sell for more. Lee ended From Point and From Line in 1984, and the supply of them is small. I read the gap as closed supply against open supply. Nothing is being added to the early series, so every one that comes up is a resale. Dialogue is still being painted, and while Pace or Kukje can sell a new one, a recent Dialogue at auction is competing with the gallery. A premium attaches to what the gallery can no longer sell you. Within Dialogue itself, a grey stroke and a coloured one are priced apart, as the next section shows. Pace, which calls the later series Correspondence, dates them the same way; Korean catalogues use the French spelling Correspondance and I have kept the catalogue spelling for individual lots.
Inside Dialogue, grey and colour are priced apart
The sharpest case sits inside a single year at a single house. On 26 February 2026 Seoul Auction sold a 218x290cm Dialogue from 2008, a 300 ho canvas in oil and mineral pigment, at $708,500 against an estimate of $708,500 to $1,342,422. It hammered at the low estimate. Three months later, on 28 May, the same house sold a 96x130cm Dialogue in acrylic, one fifth the area, for $775,622 against $522,053 to $894,948.
Put the two pictures side by side and the reason is on the canvas. The 300 ho is one small grey stroke in a very large field. The 60 ho is a single stroke of saturated magenta. It is not just these two. I sorted every Dialogue canvas Seoul Auction sold from 2022 by its K-artmarket photograph.
| Stroke | Medium | Hammer (size) |
|---|---|---|
| Colour: blue, magenta, several colours | Acrylic on canvas | $1,193,264 (300 ho), $969,527 (150 ho, Hong Kong), $775,622 (60 ho), $745,790 (80 ho), $671,211 (80 ho) |
| Grey | Oil and mineral pigment on canvas | $708,500 (300 ho), $633,922 (200 ho), $499,679 (100 ho), $343,064 (20 ho), $335,606 (30 ho) |
At 300 ho the blue stroke made $1,193,264 and the grey one $708,500, about 1.7 times. A grey 100 ho made less than either colour 80 ho. Every colour canvas is acrylic and every grey one is oil and mineral pigment, so the medium and the picture move together.
So does the date. Press reports confirm two years: the $1,193,264 blue Dialogue is 2019 and the $708,500 grey one is 2008. The registration number in each K-artmarket record appears to carry the year, and for those two it matches. Read the same way, the other grey canvases are from about 2007 to 2008 and the magenta 60 ho from about 2018. That is my reading of the numbers, not a documented date.
What follows is interpretation. The market treats the grey mineral pigment Dialogue of the late 2000s and the colour acrylic Dialogue of the late 2010s as different things. A coloured stroke reads from across a room and holds a wall on its own; a small grey mark in a three metre field asks the viewer to read the empty space, and fewer buyers want that. The data cannot say whether the premium is for colour or for the later date, because the two never separate here.
Size still played a part. The reserve can be no higher than the low estimate, and below the reserve the auctioneer may bid on the consignor's behalf, so the price can reach the low estimate however many real bidders there are. A hammer exactly there means nobody bid past it. The record cannot say how many people were bidding below that point, only that none of them would go further. Few people have a wall for a 300 ho canvas, and in February K Auction put a 300 ho Dialogue into the same week, which split that small group in two. The 60 ho went $253,569 past its low estimate, which in a saleroom normally means at least two people bidding against each other. It had the picture more people want at a size more people can hang, and the 300 ho had neither.
Large canvases are worth a third less than in 2022
| Year | Lots of 100 ho and over | Median | Highest |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 5 | $969,527 | $1,044,106 |
| 2023 | 3 | $671,211 | $894,948 |
| 2024 | 1 | $708,500 | $708,500 |
| 2025 | 6 | $633,922 | $1,193,264 |
| 2026 | 5 | $663,753 | $1,118,685 |
That is a 32 per cent fall in the median from 2022 to 2026, on five lots a year. The 30 ho and 40 to 50 ho bands fell too; the only band that rose has two lots in its final year.
Volume fell with it. Sorted by year of sale, the 585 lots run 173, 125, 115, 87, and 85 in the first eight months of 2026. Unique works alone go from 54 in 2022 to 21 in 2025, then 27 through August 2026.
Read the two tables together. While prices fell, owners waited, so 2024 and 2025 had little to sell. The return in 2026 looks like owners timing consignments to the year of his ninetieth birthday and the museum shows that came with it, which is a common thing to do. The 2022 figure of $969,527 needs care as well. It was set by paintings consigned in the 2021 mood, and it is the number an owner remembers, while a buyer remembers everything since. The next section is what the distance between those two memories looks like.
What the big 2026 canvases were asked to make
On 24 June 2026, the day the artist turned 90, K Auction offered a 227.3x181.8cm From Point from 1980, a 150 ho canvas, at $1,193,264 to $2,237,370. It sold for $1,118,685, under the low estimate. Writing up a sale whose headline was a record price for calligraphy, the JoongAng filed the painting under the evening's weak modern and contemporary section: "이우환의 150호 '점으로부터'가 예상가(16억~30억 원)보다 낮은 15억원에 낙찰되고". The 150 ho From Point, it says, sold at 1.5 billion won, below the 1.6 to 3 billion won estimate.
February was stranger. Both major houses put a 300 ho Dialogue into the same week. Seoul Auction's 2008 canvas made its low estimate, as above. K Auction's 2007 canvas was previewed by Newsis on 13 February at $1,006,816 to $1,789,896, alongside a 100 ho Dialogue from 2002 at $805,453 to $1,044,106. Neither appears in the K-artmarket record, and neither appears in K Auction's own published results for that sale, while four other Lee Ufan lots from the session do. Withdrawn before the sale, bought in, or never consigned in the end: I do not know which, and the three have different meanings. What is left either way is that the two lots the house led its February sale with are not in the sold record. One of the four that did sell was a 60 ho With Winds, hammered at $275,942. Munhwa Ilbo had previewed a 1990 With Winds of 60 ho in that sale at $283,400 to $596,632, so if it is the same painting, and it is the only With Winds in the sale, it too sold under its low estimate. The record carries no year, so I cannot confirm the match.
A hammer below the low estimate means the reserve was set under it and no bid reached even the bottom of the house's range. That is not unusual in itself: the reserve can be no higher than the low estimate, and Ashenfelter and Graddy's study puts it at around 70 per cent of the low on average. What matters here is that the lowest figure the house proposed drew no bid.
Of the eight Lee Ufan lots sold in 2026 whose estimates I could find, four hammered exactly on the low estimate and two below it. The February With Winds and the three above come from press reports; the four August lots carry their estimates in the K-artmarket record.
| Date | House | Work | Estimate | Hammer | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 26 Feb 2026 | Seoul Auction | Dialogue, 2008, canvas, 300 ho | $708,500 to $1,342,422 | $708,500 | At low |
| 27 Feb 2026 | K Auction | With Winds, canvas, 60 ho | $283,400 to $596,632 | $275,942 | Below low (match likely) |
| 28 May 2026 | Seoul Auction | Dialogue, canvas, 60 ho | $522,053 to $894,948 | $775,622 | Above mid |
| 24 Jun 2026 | K Auction | From Point, 1980, canvas, 150 ho | $1,193,264 to $2,237,370 | $1,118,685 | Below low |
| 25 Aug 2026 | Seoul Auction | Correspondance, 1994, canvas, 92x72cm, 30 ho | $164,074 to $335,606 | $164,074 | At low |
| 25 Aug 2026 | Seoul Auction | Untitled, 2007, paper, 57x77cm | $70,850 to $149,158 | $70,850 | At low |
| 26 Aug 2026 | K Auction | From Point, two works, canvas, 14.8x15.7cm | $216,279 to $298,316 | $216,279 | At low |
| 26 Aug 2026 | K Auction | Untitled, 2002, ceramic | $13,424 to $37,290 | $15,662 | Just above low |
One or two of these would be chance. The same shape across canvas, paper and ceramic, both houses, and February to August is a pattern. To win a consignment a house has to offer an estimate the owner will accept, and the owner remembers 2021 and 2022, and the other house may want the same painting. So estimates are set above what the room will now pay. Where bidding reaches the low estimate and stops, the lot sells there. Where nobody is, it sells below the low estimate or disappears from the record. Those three outcomes account for almost all of 2026.
In a year with Venice, Dia Beacon and Avignon, the large canvases in Korea still sold at or under their low estimates. Museum shows build a reputation. An auction price is set by how many people raise a hand in one room in one week.
Prints: twelve matched groups, twelve falls
Three hundred and fifty of the 585 lots are prints, with a median of $8,204. They also sell in a different place from the paintings: at least 238 of them went through sales with online, weekly or e BID in the sale name, and no canvas sold in a Seoul Auction or K Auction online sale. For the houses, most prints fill the monthly online sales rather than the front of a catalogue.
| Technique | Lots | Median | Highest |
|---|---|---|---|
| Digital and offset print | 39 | $12,678 | $28,340 |
| Lithograph | 229 | $10,068 | $31,323 |
| Screenprint | 12 | $5,332 | $17,153 |
| Drypoint, etching and aquatint | 51 | $3,356 | $31,323 |
| Woodcut | 19 | $2,983 | $93,224 |
The woodcut figure is one lot: a 130x161cm Dialogue 2019 2 at Seoul Auction on 23 June 2026. The second dearest print of the five years made $31,323, so that number does not belong in an average.
The yearly medians for prints look like a rise, from $7,458 in 2022 to $11,187 in 2025, then $8,204 in 2026. They are not. The median area of the prints coming to sale went from 2,760cm2 in 2022 to 3,754cm2 in 2026. Bigger sheets, not higher prices.
Match the sheets instead. These are the twelve title and size groups that traded in both 2022 to 2023 and 2025 to 2026, with each period's median. Sizes are rounded to the nearest centimetre for grouping.
| Size | Technique | 2022 to 2023 | 2025 to 2026 | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Correspondence A | 56x76cm | Lithograph | $7,831 | $4,102 | -48% |
| Untitled | 46x60cm | Lithograph | $12,678 | $7,644 | -40% |
| Untitled | 58x44cm | Lithograph | $12,865 | $8,204 | -36% |
| Untitled | 25.5x34cm | Aquatint | $7,458 | $4,922 | -34% |
| Untitled | 60x46cm | Lithograph | $11,187 | $7,644 | -32% |
| Correspondence '95 1 | 68x50cm | Lithograph | $5,407 | $3,729 | -31% |
| Untitled | 61x47cm | Lithograph | $11,187 | $7,831 | -30% |
| Correspondence B | 56x76cm | Lithograph | $5,780 | $4,102 | -29% |
| From Point | 11x7.5cm | Drypoint | $1,641 | $1,193 | -27% |
| Untitled | 48x62cm | Lithograph | $11,560 | $8,949 | -23% |
| Untitled | 46x62cm | Lithograph | $11,373 | $11,187 | -2% |
| Untitled | 34x25cm | Aquatint | $3,729 | $3,729 | 0% |
One caveat is load bearing here. The K-artmarket records carry no edition numbers. When the same title and size comes up repeatedly, this data cannot tell you whether one sheet is being resold or different sheets of the same edition are appearing. Prints are made in fixed numbers, so different sheets is the likelier reading, which makes the table a record of the price band for a plate rather than the history of one object. The direction is the same either way.
My reading of why every group fell is the way prints are sold. There are many of the same sheet. Once one sells, the next is estimated off that result, and if nobody will pay it the next sells a little lower, which becomes the reference for the one after.
The record has a clean case. A 72x55.5cm Untitled archival pigment print came up at K Auction's major sales ten times between April 2024 and December 2025. It made $28,340, then $15,662, $17,899 and $17,899, then $13,424 four times and $11,933 twice. Without edition numbers I cannot say whether any sheet appeared twice, but the same title, size and medium came up about every other month for twenty months. When more sheets are offered than there are buyers, the price walks down the stairs.
The fees make resale harder still. Seoul Auction's buyer's premium at its live sales is 18 per cent of the hammer before VAT, reported by Asia Economy in February 2026, and the seller pays a commission of their own out of the hammer. A sheet bought at $12,678 in 2022 to 2023 that comes back at $7,644 has lost 40 per cent before either fee.
How the foreign houses handle him
The Korean record in this article is complete for its period; the foreign one is not. Four foreign results are in the record table above, and two more sit below it. At Sotheby's Hong Kong's Modern and Contemporary Day sale on 29 September 2025 a 2021 Response made $849,000 with premium against a low estimate of about $514,200, reported by HENI. At Christie's London's Post-War to Present sale on 25 June 2026, a 45.7x53.3cm From Point made $223,575 with premium against $135,418 to $203,127; that is lot 116 in my own record of the sale.
The two markets do not compare directly. The Korean figures in this article are hammer prices, and these foreign ones include the premium.
The 2026 pattern travels. Christie's Hong Kong sold all 37 lots in its 27 March evening sale, and inside that white glove result the Lee Ufan From Line hammered at $994,734, under its low estimate of $1,020,240 (THE VALUE). The Phillips lot in 2022, estimated at $1,147,770 to $1,785,420, hammered at its low estimate exactly. That is the same shape as the Seoul 300 ho at its low estimate in February and the 150 ho under its low estimate in June.
The London lot is the one that went the other way. About 10 ho, it cleared its high estimate, against a Korean median of $126,784 for canvases that size; the Korean median excludes the premium and the London figure does not, so the real gap is narrower than it looks.
Placement says the rest. Both From Line canvases went into evening sales, where a house puts the season's strongest material, and the 2021 Response went into a day sale, one tier down. The one recent painting to reach an evening sale, the 2020 Dialogue in 2023, came with a named collection behind it. Even in the evening slot, 2026 did not clear the low estimate.
Ceramics, and the one sculpture
Seventy lots are ceramic or three dimensional, with a median of $14,916. Most are catalogued as painted ceramic, plates and vessel forms; eight are terracotta. Many rows have no dimensions, so I have not broken them down by size.
They are the one part of the record where volume is climbing: 9 lots in 2022, 8, 15, 16, then 22 in the first eight months of 2026. The median fell from $21,628 in 2022 to $8,390 in 2025 and came back to $16,034 in 2026.
Relatum, the sculpture series Lee has worked on since 1968, has appeared once. A 589x56cm steel plate and stone piece sold at Seoul Auction on 25 April 2023 for $223,737. Anyone reading his exhibition history, where the sculptures carry most of the weight, will find almost nothing in the Korean saleroom record to price them against.
The rise in ceramics while paintings thinned may not be coincidence. A house wants the artist's name to keep appearing in its catalogues so that the people who follow him keep looking, and when a canvas is hard to get, a ceramic in the tens of thousands of dollars fills the slot. That is my interpretation of a rising count, and I cannot confirm that any house thought about it that way.
How a specialist would read this
Everything above is the record. What follows is how the auction business works on it, which is interpretation and should be read as such.
The series is a supply question. Size matters less than period for Lee, because From Point and From Line stopped in 1984 and Dialogue can still be bought new from a gallery. Auction pays a premium for what the primary market can no longer supply, and the international houses give their evening slots to the 1970s canvases. With the year of execution missing from almost every Korean record, the catalogue entry and the back of the canvas carry more of the value than usual.
A hammer at the low estimate is a thin result. Below the reserve the auctioneer can bid for the consignor, and several bidders can compete and still stop at the low estimate, so the result does not say how many were bidding. It says nobody would go past it. Six of eight 2026 lots with known estimates ended at or under the low. Repeated at the top of a market, that says depth has gone even where the headline number looks intact.
The estimate is set between two memories. Houses compete for consignments and must offer estimates owners will accept, and Lee's owners remember East Winds and the 2022 median for large canvases. Buyers remember what came after. The February lots missing from the record and the two canvases under their low estimates, in February and June, say that distance has not closed.
Supply follows confidence. Six of the fifteen top prices came in 2022 and one in 2024; unique works fell from 54 lots to 21 before coming back in 2026. A thin year mixes lower prices with worse material, which is why the tables here hold size constant instead of quoting the overall median. For a buyer, a thin room means lots closing near their reserves.
Prints do not follow the paintings. The same plate keeps coming back, each result sets the next estimate, and all twelve matched groups fell. With the buyer's premium at 18 per cent plus VAT before the seller's commission, a Lee Ufan print is something to hang, not something to trade.
After 2016, provenance is part of the price. The artist's word, the laboratory and the court came apart in public over the same thirteen paintings. Where a painting has been, and which auction or gallery record shows it, carries as much weight as the hammer.
One limit applies to all of it. These are sold lots. Unsold and withdrawn lots are not in the data, and the two missing Dialogue canvases in February show how much the unsold side can say.
What this does and does not tell you
The record supports a few plain statements. Canvas and paper are separately priced and the ratio is stable across sizes. A small canvas from the series Lee stopped making in 1984 can outprice a large recent one. Large canvases have come down since 2022 on thin annual samples, and the print market has fallen about a third on matched sheets while its headline median drifted up on a changing mix.
It does not tell you what the work is worth. Only four of the 585 rows carry an estimate, and only three carry a year of execution, which is why nothing here is sorted by date of painting. For a body of work where two decades separate a From Point from a Dialogue, that is the missing column, and the catalogue for the individual lot is the only place to get it. After 2016, it is also the place to start on whether the painting is his.