Li Jhao-Ci's work is deeply influenced by literature, particularly Latin American novels by writers such as Roberto Bolaño and Mario Vargas Llosa. Many of his artworks carry suggestive titles that nod to literary sources. His interest in literature stems from how these novels depict the universal human condition, the intellectual's dilemma, disasters between nations, and the repetitive cycles of history. They also explore how art (literature) can serve as a form of resistance. The chaos, fiction, and political violence described in these books have inspired Li to explore how painting can become a textual reading experience.

In 2023, Li self-published a zine titled Contemporary Dog Eats Its Own Fur. Its contents closely mirror the state of his paintings. In his creative process, he often hides textual elements within his imagery. These words sometimes originate from the zine and sometimes emerge later as responses to his paintings. In his earlier works, he explored themes of survival and its entangled difficulties, the distortion of desire, all of which were translated into imagery. Dogs and houses appeared frequently in his paintings, shown reproducing, colliding, and intertwining with one another. During this phase, Li pursued highly layered and intricate visuals, believing that only through such visual density could he capture the complex narratives akin to long-form novels.

In 2024, Li began incorporating found objects and installation elements into his practice. These works often featured grafted cacti and succulents, assembled like building blocks into defensive structures or weapons. Grafting, a recurring technique in his work, involves cutting off the heads of two plants and joining them at their vascular tissue, allowing the bottom plant to nourish the top one. For Li, grafting serves as a metaphorical action: breaking and splicing, a forced union. It is a violent yet tender and somewhat deformed method of survival and reproduction, which he sees as an allegory for Taiwan's historical and cultural development. Visually, he represents grafting through motifs of disconnection and reconnection, repetition, and mutation. Beneath the childlike surface of his imagery lies a current of latent violence.

At the end of 2024, he held his first solo exhibition at Glitch Space in Taichung, titled Want to Hook on to Some Trees and Birds. The exhibition addressed the ambient sense of crisis he felt about contemporary life. A fake gun pointed out toward a half-open balcony, anti-climb spikes adorned the balcony and the staircase exit — confrontational yet unnoticed until departure. Works such as Little S, At what precise moment had Zavalita fucked himself up referenced novels by Vargas Llosa, including Conversation in the Cathedral and The Feast of the Goat. Assigning such titles allowed him to quietly embed political anxieties from literature into his own work, serving as a response to the sociopolitical climate in Taiwan. Ironically, the exhibition was cut short due to an electrical fire in the building below.

In 2025, Li presented a solo exhibition at E’er Gallery titled The King's Tail is a Donkey's Tail. The title rewrites a well-known folktale, replacing "ears" with "tail" — turning a symbol of deception into one of bodily regression, a trace of pre-human evolution. This linguistic twist already suggests a kind of grafting or semantic misalignment.

This exhibition included installations made of plants — shaped like scepters, crowns, or angelic halos. The accompanying curatorial text was purposefully poetic and ambiguous, while the titles of works such as The Great and Insidious Tail, The King of the East, The King of the West, Scepter, and The Hollow Pillar of the King slyly hinted at themes of authority and symbolic power. The show brought together earlier paintings and newer installations in a dialogue of symbols and visual codes. Two zines and a site map served as additional interpretive tools to guide viewers through the exhibition's thematic terrain.