Cai Xiaoli was born into a family of painters of Fujian Province. While working for the Shanxi Provincial Song and Dance Theatre, she learned Western painting under Wu Zhide and traditional Chinese portrait painting under Wang Ziwu, before entering the Traditional Chinese Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Art in China where she afterward taught brush painting. After arriving in England in 1989, the artist sought to harmonize her own independent style with traditional methods such as can be seen in the lot above.