In Li Hu’s Sound of Horn from Temple, a procession moves through a densely packed city, its figures winding between buildings that rise in every direction. A detail from the painting appears on the cover of this issue, introducing an artist whose densely worked surfaces turn streets, structures, and gatherings into psychological landscapes.
The painting is included in “Li Hu: My Life Journey (1950–2016),” a retrospective at Ethan Cohen Gallery at the KuBe Art Center in Beacon on exhibit through October 31. Curated by Gan Yu and Ethan Cohen, the exhibition follows a life shaped by political upheaval, immigration, education, and an extraordinary capacity to begin again.
Born into a family of artists in Shanghai in 1950, Li came of age during the Cultural Revolution. Removed from school and sent to work in the countryside, he continued studying at night by candlelight after days spent laboring in rice paddies. When China’s universities reopened, he enrolled at the Fine Arts College of Shanghai University, receiving intensive training in drawing, anatomy, composition, and figurative painting. After graduating in 1986, he joined the faculty.
By then, Li had secured a respected position in China. In 1990, he and his wife, Ping, moved their young family to Vermillion, South Dakota, where he entered the University of South Dakota’s graduate program. During the summers, Li traveled to New York City and worked as a street portraitist, joining a community of Chinese artists who used their formidable draftsmanship to pay rent and support their families while attempting to establish themselves in a new country.
Li earned his MFA in 1993 and the following year became an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh. He eventually rose to full professor and received an endowed professorship in 2006. During his career, he mounted more than 40 solo exhibitions and participated in over 100 juried group shows. Yet teaching remained central to his practice. Li urged students to work through failed paintings—to study the problem inside the picture and find a way forward.
That persistence runs through the work at KuBe. Li’s densely built paintings draw on the academic realism of his early training, but their visual vocabulary ranges freely across cultures and centuries. Chinese calligraphic gestures meet Western oil painting; mythology meets modern migration; architectural detail dissolves into passages that verge on abstraction. His cities appear excavated from memory—layered, unstable places where buildings accumulate like sediment and perspective seems ready to buckle.
The sculptural installation Silent Meditation gives physical form to that instability. A group of headless, armless figures sits directly on the gallery floor. Their scarred torsos are painted in raw reds, yellows, browns, and flesh tones; their hollow openings reveal the frailty of their construction. Arranged together, they suggest both a congregation and the remains of one. Their posture implies contemplation, yet their missing heads make thought impossible to locate.
In the monumental triptych Mass Migration, painted between 2012 and 2016, humanity becomes a current. Hundreds of small, dark figures move through an immense architectural landscape, pressed together by a force the painting never identifies. They might be refugees, pilgrims, workers, or survivors. Each body remains distinct, but from a distance the crowd takes on a life of its own—an organism driven forward by history. The work may recall Li’s own passage between countries, but it refuses a single explanation. The destination is unknown; movement itself becomes the subject.
Diagnosed with cancer in 2008, Li continued painting and teaching until his retirement in 2013. Before his death three years later, he and Ping established a scholarship for art students at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh. It was an apt final gesture from an artist whose life had been transformed by access to education—and who spent much of that life extending the same possibility to others.
“Li Hu: My Life Journey (1950–2016)” is on view through October 31 at Ethan Cohen Gallery at the KuBe Art Center, 20 Kent Street, Beacon.
This article appears in October 2026.
