When I mentioned in a column last year that Lee U Fan had won the Japanese Art Association's Praemium Imperiale award for painting, this provoked a number of questions from readers.
One question was: "Who is Lee U Fan?" A fair enough query, as the prize has previously been awarded to painters such as Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns and Gerhard Richter, all of them much better known than Lee.
To answer briefly: Korean-born Lee, 65, who came to Japan in 1956 to study philosophy, gained prominence in the late 1960s with the mono-ha (School of Things) movement he inspired. Mono-ha was an attempt to develop an Asian aesthetic in contemporary art; a "take things as they are" sensibility that was a reaction to the pervading Western "roll up your sleeves and jump in there and do something, Mr. Artist" attitude of the time. Simply stated, an alternative Modernism.