While woodblock print artists in China during the 1930s were strongly connected to the political Left based on the subject matter of many of their prints and articles, as well as their mentorship by the writer and iconoclast Lu Xun (魯迅, 1881-1936), the prints they left behind were not always overtly political, nor stylistically uniform. Often associated with Expressionism and an imperative to portray “reality” in the service of representing the plight of urban workers and that of the urban and rural poor, in fact many modern Chinese woodcuts at that time used a broader stylistic vocabulary, and portrayed a broader collection of subject matter, which is now starting to be discussed. For viewers of Li Hua’s (李樺, 1907-1994) work, which has often been represented in secondary sources by his overtly political Roar, China! (Nuhao ba, Zhongguo!, 1935), other early prints, for example White Horse (Bai Ma, 1935), Lyricism of the Sea (Hai Zhi Shuqing, 1935), and Life (Shengming, 1935), open a window into the artist’s experimentation with Surrealism that Li Hua himself would later disavow. This paper argues that the under-studied stylistic variation of the artist’s early work represents not only Li’s interiority and personal struggle, but was also intended to represent the struggle of Chinese artists and the nation itself during a period of extreme upheaval.