Li Huayi (b. 1948, Shanghai) is one of the greatest living painters working in the traditional style, creating masterful landscape portraits of mountains, trees and misty vistas. While the country’s avant-garde painters get all the media attention, he has quietly created a body of work that borrows from the great classics but also adds to them. His images are rich, detailed and powerful in their ability to capture an ancient world in hues of brown, grey, green and black. The son of wealthy Shanghai parents, he began studying art at the age of six, survived the Cultural Revolution creating propaganda works, and then in 1982 left for San Francisco. His works have been collected by some of the world’s leading art museums, including Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Museum of Tokyo. Jerry Yang, one of the founders of Yahoo, has also collected his works, as well as the Robert Ho Foundation through Sotheby’s. He lives and works in San Francisco and Beijing.
