 Lee, the main theorist of the Mono-ha (“School of Things”) tendency in Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was trained as a philosopher.As a painter, Lee contributed to 'Korean Monotone Art' (Dansaekjo Yesul, 單色調 藝術), the first artistic movement in 20th century Korea to be promoted in Japan.He advocates a methodology of de-westernization and demodernization in both theory and practice as an antidote to the Eurocentric thought of 1960s postwar Japanese society.