He earned the highest rank in the academy of painting of Emperor Huizong, and, after the North fell to the Mongols, went to the South and entered the academy of Emperor Song Gaozong. His landscapes—of which one dated 1124 is the most reliably ascribed—serve as a vital link between the earlier, and essentially Northern, variety of monumental landscape, and the more lyrical Southern style of the Ma-Xia school. Li perfected the brushstroke texture known as the “ax stroke,” which gives a tactile sense to painted rocks and suggests the precise and comprehensive reality that Southern Song artists sought to give their landscapes.