Li Rui is a scholar of Lingnan garden history and regional architectural history, specializing in the gardens of the Hong merchants of Canton. Her work explores reconstructing vanished gardens through the study of Chinese and Western historical images and texts, examining the evolution of spatial layouts, the mechanisms of garden construction, and the cross-cultural translation of pictorial space. From 2017 to 2018, she was a visiting student at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has published multiple papers in journals indexed by SSCI, A&HCI, and CSSCI.