First look: Lee Ufan creates a perfume bottle for Guerlain

South Korean painter, sculptor and philosopher Lee Ufan is the latest artist to accept Guerlain’s annual invitation to redesign a signature fragrance bottle from the French perfumer’s archives. Today (October 15, 2024), coinciding with Art Basel’s upcoming return to Paris on the 18th, Ufan’s version of the “Flacon Quadrilobé,” first designed by Baccarat in 1908, is released.

This new project represents an extension of the partnership between Guerlain and Ufan, which began last year (2023) with the “Art & Environment Prize”, an initiative that offers one young artist per year a residency and exhibition at Lee Ufan Arles, a new opened exhibition, gives space to the city, designed by Tadao Ando.

First look: Lee Ufan creates a minimalist perfume bottle for Guerlain

(Image credit: Courtesy of Guerlain)

Ufan, 88, has lived and worked in Japan most of his life and moved to Tokyo in 1956. In the mid-1960s he co-founded the groundbreaking avant-garde group Mono-ha (School of Things), which rejected ideas of Western representation in modern art. In particular, the artist defines his paintings as “arising from the spectacular encounter between what I have painted and what I have not painted.”

Although considered “abstract,” they are distinguished by the intentionality of his markmaking – a purposefulness that is beautifully expressed in the single brush stroke on the Guerlain bottle. “Painting is neither exclusively a figure nor exclusively a composition,” says Ufan. “It expresses a connection to space and establishes a relationship with the viewer.” In this way, I hope to create a poetic dialogue with them, that the work stimulates the imagination, that it allows them to fly off the canvas and become part of it to open the outside world, to infinity.”

(Image credit: Courtesy of Guerlain)

Ufan collaborated with Maison Bernardaud to create the bottle from pure white chiseled porcelain, harmoniously accented by touches of green paint and a silk cord around the neck and stopper.

In Japanese culture, green represents eternal life and rebirth and draws attention to nature. This is also an important starting point for “Souvenir d’Orchidée” – the new fragrance that Ufan’s bottle contains. Featuring an intoxicating blend of angelica, sambac jasmine, iris powder, moss and amber tincture, the aquatic-musky floral perfume is the result of his collaboration with Guerlain Fragrances creative director Delphine Jelk.

(Image credit: Courtesy of Guerlain)

“I hope you can feel this idea of ​​purity and freshness from nature in the scent,” she tells Wallpaper*. “There’s a mineral, ozonic quality.” [to the perfume] it’s almost wet. It gives an impression of lush nature, of water that gives life.”

Jelk, who joined Maison Guerlain in 2014, is one of the industry’s preeminent noses. She takes a visual approach to perfumery, using mood boards before she begins assembling scent materials. She describes the creation of “Souvenir d’Orchidée” as a “four-handed process” that began with a discussion of Ufan’s olfactory memories. “I made a film in my head from the stories he told me,” she says. “I imagined him as a child in the mountains, dazzled by the beauty of an orchid.”

(Image credit: Courtesy of Guerlain)

Guerlain was founded in 1828 by Pierre-François Pascal Guerlain. Today it is one of the oldest perfume and cosmetics houses in the world and also has the oldest perfume in continuous production: “Jicky”. Created in 1889 by Aimé Guerlain, “Jicky” is described as “the first modern perfume” due to its revolutionary use of notes of both synthetic and natural origins.