Li Huayi is internationally renowned for his meticulously detailed landscape paintings that are reminiscent of masterworks from the Song dynasty (960–1279). As a child, Li began studying ink painting with a family friend, Wang Chuantao (1903-1978), as well as Western-style painting with Zhang Chongren (1907-1998), who had trained at the Royal Academy of Arts in Brussels. Li was thus trained well in the technical skills of European painting and traditional Chinese painting. Li can thus be said to have inherited Shanghai's cosmopolitan past.

As a young man growing up in China during the Cultural Revolution, however, artists and art students were expected to produce the Socialist Realist propaganda images demanded at ...