On 6 November, Lee Ufan will receive the Wolfgang Hahn Prize at Museum Ludwig. The following day, a display opens there, running until 4 April 2027. It features five paintings from his series “Response” – including the one that the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst is acquiring for the museum’s collection. The prize is therefore not simply an honour followed by an exhibition: it is also a way of bringing a work into the museum permanently.
The model sounds simple, but brings together several different responsibilities. A jury selects an artist; the association organises the award and funds the acquisition; the museum displays the work and takes responsibility for its preservation and interpretation. Lee Ufan’s case offers a particularly clear view of how these decisions relate to one another.
A prize with a collecting remit
The Wolfgang Hahn Prize has been awarded by the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst at Museum Ludwig since 1994. The 2026 award is its 32nd edition. According to the museum, the award is intended above all to honour internationally recognised contemporary art that is not yet sufficiently well known in Germany. The prize is linked to an acquisition for the museum’s collection, with a maximum of 100,000 euros available for this purpose. The sum is funded by the association’s membership fees.
This distinguishes the prize from an award that primarily honours an individual or an existing work. Here, the honour creates a direct route into the collection. This does not, however, mean that awarding the prize alone determines the acquisition: the jury selects the artist, while choosing and funding the specific work involves a further, practical set of decisions. In Lee Ufan’s case, the museum cites the prizewinner’s generous accommodation as a prerequisite for making the acquisition possible. The museum webpage consulted gives no information about the final purchase price.
A gap in the collection
Lee Ufan was born in South Korea in 1936, studied philosophy in Tokyo and lives in Kamakura. As a co-founder of the Japanese Mono-ha movement, whose name roughly means “School of Things”, he explored the relationship between material, space and viewer. In painting, this relationship exists not only between objects in space, but also between the applied brushstroke and the area left untouched.
The five works announced by the museum belong to the series “Response”. In these paintings, Lee works with a broad brush on large canvases. The strokes appear in graduated tones ranging from bright white to dark grey; they stand as individual forms within a larger, largely unpainted space. The museum describes the paintings as rhythmically structured patterns. The space between paint and bare canvas is not merely a background: it becomes part of what unfolds within the picture.
Until now, Museum Ludwig’s collection has lacked a work by Lee Ufan, although his work was shown in the Rhineland and at the museum itself in the 1970s. Museum director Yilmaz Dziewior described the artist as a long-standing wish for the collection. The acquisition thus fills an acknowledged gap. The available information does not specify which individual canvas was chosen or its precise dimensions.
Who decides what stays?
The prize money comes from the membership fees paid to the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst. The association is therefore not merely lending its name or organising an event, but participating in a long-term decision about which art the museum will preserve and make publicly accessible in future. The members fund the acquisition; curatorial responsibility and responsibility for the work’s conservation rest with the museum. This is a collaboration with clearly differentiated roles, not an automatic alignment between the association’s wishes and the museum’s judgement.
The selection for 2026 was made by a jury with Mami Kataoka, director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, as guest juror. The museum also explains the decision by pointing to Lee Ufan’s long-standing engagement with questions that cannot be reduced to a simple opposition between “Eastern” and “Western” art. This framing matters: Mono-ha emerged in Japan, yet Lee’s work cannot be treated as an exotic addition to a Western collection. The acquisition expands the holdings without assuming that the artist’s origins alone explain what his art means.
A prize that culminates in an acquisition shifts attention from a one-off ceremony to the longer term. The exhibition initially makes the decision visible; afterwards, the acquired work remains part of a collection whose narrative changes with each addition. For Museum Ludwig, Lee Ufan is therefore more than this year’s prizewinner. In future, his painting will also be assessed in terms of how it can be seen and understood among the works already in the museum.
Original reviewed by the editors · 29 October 2026
