Li Tang has worked for most of his life as a painter at the court of Song Emperor Huizong in Kaifeng.

The highly influential Li, a pivotal figure in the transition from the monumentally scaled landscape tradition of the Northern Song period to the more intimate mode of the succeeding Southern Song period, is renowned for his so-called ax-cut brushstroke, which he employs to finely depict sharply faceted rock surfaces, as in his celebrated scroll painting “Whispering Pines in the Mountains”, executed in 1124.

After the Jurchen invasion in 1126, he had fed with the court to Hangzhou, becoming director of the imperial painting academy there until his death in 1130, at about eighty.