Li Yuan Chia

~Li Yuan Chia was one of the first significant Chinese abstract artists of the 20th century.

Sally Lai - former director of Manchester's Chinese Arts Centre - examines his career from the place he spent the last 28 years of his life: a stone farmhouse, built next to Hadrian's Wall in Cumbria.

Born in China in 1929, Li was educated in Taiwan. He worked and exhibited in Italy before moving to London in 1963. Here, Li's reputation was established with monochrome paintings and scrolls marked with a tiny, isolated dot.

But Li came to dislike the fashionable metropolitan art world of the mid-1960s. In 1968 he met Cumbrian painter Winifred Nicholson, who persuaded Li to move.

When Taiwan's first abstract artist settled in a Cumbrian farmhouse, his life changed. Deriving inspiration from landscape and local people, he encouraged new British artists and anticipated the success of contemporary Chinese visual art.

Producer: Bob Dickinson

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in December 2009.

Sally Lai explores why Chinese artist Li Yuan Chia made a home for artists in Cumbria.