Li Huayi, born in 1948 in Shanghai, was raised in China where he started to learn and practice antique drawing and painting techniques from the age of six. He was still a teenager when he became a "worker artist" during the Cultural Revolution, drawing mainly propaganda posters. He later discovered the paintings of the Song Dynasty and studied their techniques. He moved to San Francisco in 1982, where he received his M.F.A. at the Academy of Art. Kuiyi Shen is Professor of Art History, Theory & Criticism at the University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on modern and contemporary Chinese art. His publications include Shanghai Modern, Chinese Posters, Arts of Modern China (winner of the 2013 ICAS Book Prize in Humanities), and Liangyou – Kaleidoscopic Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metropolis, 1926-1949. He curated the exhibitions A Century in Crisis: Tradition and Modernity in the Art of Twentieth Century China at the Guggenheim Museums New York and Bilbao in 1998 and Reboot: The Third Chengdu Biennial in 2007.