In recent years, most of Li Jian's works are depicting animals, including apes, tigers, deer and others which would fall into the category of birds and animals of the traditional Chinese painting. But it is clear that he does not plan to cultivate the traditional Chinese pictorial spectrum in depth, but rather to explore a new territory of his own. Although Li Jian's paintings are still associated with Chinese painting and concepts such as "new ink" and "neo-gongbi," he has long consciously avoided these established pictorial resources, aware of the danger of falling into the conceptual and pictorial dilemmas. Therefore, he started from the system of bird-and-flower painting and stripped the images of animals from the visual structure of flowers, plants, trees and rocks.