Li Hu: My Life Journey (1950 — 2016): The KuBe Art Center, 20 Kent Street, Beacon, NY

Ethan Cohen Gallery at the KuBe Art Center is pleased to present Li Hu: My Life Journey (1950–2016), curated by Gan Yu and Ethan Cohen. The exhibition opens on September 12, 3 – 5 pm, and remains on view through October 12, 2026

Li Hu: Planting Himself in America

Artist, Immigrant, Teacher, and the American Dream

By Ethan Cohen

To understand the importance of Li Hu, we must consider the paintings he left behind and the extraordinary journey required to make them.

Born in Shanghai in 1950 into a family of artists, Li belonged to a generation profoundly shaped by the political and cultural upheavals of twentieth-century China. His youth coincided with the Cultural Revolution, when education, intellectual life, family history, and individual ambition could suddenly become liabilities. Pulled from school and sent to perform manual labor in the countryside, Li continued his education at night, studying by candlelight after working in the rice paddies.

That image tells us something fundamental about Li Hu long before he became a successful artist or professor: he was a trailblazer. 

Following the end of the Cultural Revolution, Li pursued the artistic education that had been denied to so many members of his generation. He entered the Fine Arts College of Shanghai University, where he received rigorous academic training in drawing, composition, anatomy, observation, and figurative painting. After graduating in 1986, he was appointed to teach painting at his alma mater.

He had achieved something significant in China. Then he chose to begin again.

In 1990, Li, his wife Ping, and their young family left China for the United States. They settled in Vermillion, South Dakota, where Li entered the graduate program at the University of South Dakota.

In America, Li was no longer simply an accomplished painter and Chinese professor. He was an immigrant. He had to learn a new language, understand a new culture, navigate a different university system, establish American academic credentials, and support his family. He also had to discover how an artist deeply formed by Chinese history and education could find a place within American culture without surrendering the experiences that had made him who he was. While pursuing his graduate education, Li traveled during the summers to New York City, where he worked as a street portrait artist alongside other Chinese artists.

I find this episode particularly moving. When I opened my gallery in SoHo in 1987, many of the Chinese artists I knew made portraits on the streets of New York to pay their rent, support their families, and buy food. One of them was Ai Weiwei, whom I knew well and who made portraits whenever he needed money. Seeing so many Chinese artists earning a living this way inspired me to come up with the idea to curate an exhibition titled Survival, where I would invite artists into the gallery to create portraits of visitors, who could purchase the drawings on the spot. I wanted people to understand how Chinese artists were adapting to a foreign country and the realities of a capitalist system.

Li’s experience belonged to this larger history. Here was a highly trained painter who had taught at a major Chinese university, traveling halfway across the United States to draw portraits on the streets of New York because he needed to support his family in South Dakota. Artistic talent became a means of survival.

Li earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of South Dakota in 1993. The following year, he was hired as an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh in a tenure-track position.

Only four years after arriving in America, he had learned to navigate a new country and academic culture, completed an American graduate degree, and entered the university system as a professor. He progressed from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor and ultimately Full Professor. He earned tenure, and in 2006 the university awarded him an Endowed Professorship.

Li Hu had planted himself in America. In many ways, he lived the American dream. I do not use that phrase lightly. In Li’s story, the American dream was not an effortless ascent. It was the opportunity to begin again and build something through ability, discipline, education, sacrifice, and perseverance.

He became a respected professor and exhibited his paintings across the United States and internationally. Beginning in 1994, he presented more than forty solo exhibitions and participated in more than one hundred juried group exhibitions. Yet professional achievement alone does not explain Li Hu’s importance. His greatest American legacy may be found in his students.

Li loved teaching. His former students describe a professor who gave himself completely to their development. He taught them how to draw and paint, but he also taught them how to persevere. When a painting failed, the answer was not necessarily to discard it and begin again. The challenge was to understand what had gone wrong and solve the problem. That is an artistic lesson and a philosophy of life. Li had been solving problems his entire life: the Cultural Revolution, interrupted education, immigration, language, graduate school, supporting a family, and establishing an academic career in America. He confronted each one, and then taught his students to do the same.

Li brought rigorous training, respect for craft, Chinese history and visual culture, and an understanding of perseverance born from circumstances most of his American students could scarcely imagine. He did not simply preserve these things. He shared them, changing the cultural environment around him.

His story forms part of the still insufficiently understood history of Chinese artists who came to the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. I was fortunate to witness this history firsthand. In 1984, for my senior thesis project at Harvard College, I organized a solo exhibition of Yuan Yunsheng titled An Enigma Set Free. After graduation, I moved to New York and became friends with many members of the Chinese avant-garde who had left China to experience the West, including Xu Bing, Ai Weiwei, Yan Li, Ma Desheng, Wang Keping, Lin Tianmiao, Wang Gongxin, Gao Zhang, and Zhang Wei. Li Hu was one of a few hundred Chinese Artists in New York during this period. 

These artists did not simply come to America and become American. They helped change what American culture could be. They entered universities, studios, galleries, museums, and communities. They taught, exhibited, raised families, and brought with them memories, philosophies, visual languages, and artistic traditions that became part of the American cultural landscape.

Li Hu is an outstanding example of this phenomenon, and his paintings embody that dialogue. The academic realism of his Chinese training did not disappear when he arrived in America. His visual language expanded. Chinese calligraphy encountered Western oil painting. Chinese mythology encountered Michelangelo. Personal memory encountered abstraction. Chinese art could be reconsidered from Wisconsin.

East and West were no longer opposing categories. Li was finding his voice within a newly global art world. Like many artists of his generation, he resisted ethnic categorization and asked to be considered as an artist living and working in the United States, rather than confined to the label of “Chinese artist.” That freedom is central to his mature work.

This exhibition allows us to look deeply at Li Hu’s art. Two works are particularly powerful. In Silent Meditation, an installation of human figures seated on the floor with their backs to the audience, the bodies lack heads, arms, and feet. The work evokes anonymity, fragility, reflection, and the mysteries of human nature. It invites us to question what Li was thinking and why he created this haunting image.

The other major work is his monumental triptych Mass Migration, created between 2012 and 2016. Li depicts masses of distinct human beings crowded together so densely that they begin to lose their individual identities. Where are they going? What has brought them together? Are they fleeing a natural disaster, political upheaval, or something unknown? The painting creates a powerful visual poem about displacement and collective movement. Its questions transcend time.

When Li was diagnosed with cancer in 2008, he faced another enormous challenge. Once again, he continued. He painted and taught for as long as he could. He retired from the university in 2013, but he did not retire from being an artist.

Before his death in 2016, Li and Ping established the Li Hu Art-Student Scholarship at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh. That decision tells us almost everything we need to know about him. After fighting to obtain education, opportunity, artistic freedom, and professional recognition, his response was to create an opportunity for someone else.

He planted another seed.

The metaphor is particularly appropriate because Li loved gardening. He understood that planting is an act of faith. You prepare the earth, place something small within it, nurture it, and trust that what you have begun will continue growing after you have stepped away. That is precisely what Li did as a teacher. His students became artists. Some became teachers, passing their knowledge to another generation.

Li Hu died on April 13, 2016, at the age of sixty-five, after a long struggle with cancer. But his story did not end. His paintings remain. His students remain. His scholarship remains. His influence continues through people who may someday teach students who never knew Li Hu’s name, but who nevertheless receive something that originated with him.

Li Hu represents the contribution of a generation of Chinese artists who crossed an ocean and rebuilt themselves in America. They arrived carrying their histories. They encountered obstacles, learned, adapted, taught, and created. In doing so, they made a permanent contribution to the culture that received them.

Li planted his feet in American soil without severing his Chinese roots. From those two worlds, he created a life and planted seeds for the generations that followed.