Painter Blends, Transcends Cultures

Li Huai once thought she would never have the artistic opportunities she has today. Seven years ago the Chinese painter, living in Beijing, was struggling to express her feelings about Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution through abstract paintings.

Now Li Huai, 34, no longer has to struggle to express her creativity. After her 1983 marriage in China to Paul Pickowicz, a UC San Diego Chinese history and film professor, she took 500 completed paintings and her dreams to the United States. Since then, Li Huai has been working out of a studio in La Jolla and from June 10 to July 23, 60 of her works will be exhibited at the San Diego Museum of Art in a show titled “Li Huai: An Artist in Two Cultures.”

In the show Li Huai (her friends call her Li but professionally she uses her full name) will offer visitors a contemporary perspective of the contrast between Western and Chinese artistic cultures. The paintings reflect the impact of the Cultural Revolution, which stifled her modern, avant-garde style paintings, as well as her classical Confucian training, which she began at age 7 with traditional Chinese calligraphy lessons.

“Fifty of the 60 paintings were done in China. They were all banned during the Cultural Revolution,” said Li Huai. Five of the paintings are a series of nudes done 10 years ago. “Even now these would be considered immoral,” she said.

“They were thought of as bourgeois--decadence,” said Pickowicz.

Li Huai, her husband and their 4-year-old daughter, Natasha, now live in Valencia, where she is in the Master of Fine Arts program at CalArts.

“It’s rare to see someone come out of one culture and adapt so readily to another. But Li made an incredible adaptation to art in the U.S.,” said Millie Wilson, director of programs and art at CalArts. “She is a phenomenal painter even without her bicultural background--and produced an amazing art installation.” If she was not in the United States, she would be doing remarkable things in China, she said.

As Li Huai sat in her Valencia home, she remembered what it was like when she first arrived in the United States.

“I had so much energy. Suddenly I could use color, form and content I never could use before. Suddenly I could work on problems that I wanted to paint about while I was still in China.”

“Li was like a person dying of thirst,” said Pickowicz, also remembering those first few years. Except it was a thirst that could not be quenched in just a few days--it took three years. Li worked day and night to finish up the agenda that she could not complete in China.”

The best example of this “burst of energy” is work No. 51 in the exhibit, said Pickowicz. The painting, “Ferule,” consists of 52 individual panels. Each panel tells a separate tale of the human holocaust of the Cultural Revolution, he said.

Many people think that Chinese artists come to America and immediately paint American things, said Pickowicz. Not Li Huai--she had too much else on her mind, he said. “She had to come to terms with the Revolution first.”

Other people think that all Chinese artists either paint bamboo and birds, exotic landscapes, or 19th- and early 20th-Century art being produced in China. It is much harder to be judged in terms of global art, he said.

And Li Huai does not want to be stereotyped as a Chinese artist or an American artist for that matter.

“I just want to be regarded as part of the critical art world,” she said.

Certainly all preconceptions about Li Huai are dropped as soon as visitors enter her studio.

“They may walk in hoping to see only charcoal drawings of exotic landscapes done on rice paper,” said Pickowicz. “And they do see this. But they also come out of her studio shaken up--for the better.”

“Salted Fish,” for instance, brings together traditional Chinese culture and the struggle to reach beyond the Chinese social context, the artist said. In the painting Li Huai uses dark grays, blacks and hand-painted white words, telling the ancient folk story about Chinese salted fish. She said the painting, different from anything she has created before, is her way of showing the complex web of connections among people in China.

The Chinese do not just have to learn from Americans, but Americans have to learn from the Chinese, said Li Huai. “It’s a two-way street.”

“The Chinese are now becoming interested in Modernism, but they are still way behind Western art. They have no idea about Postmodernism,” she said, pointing out that when she finishes her studies at CalArts she wants to actively help inform Chinese artists and art students about what is going on in the art world outside China.

In fact, the artist and her husband are planning to take 20 American art and film students to China next summer. Through an agreement with the University of California and the Beijing Film Institute, where Li Huai did her undergraduate studies, the couple are planning to lead a four-week seminar on the resurgence of Chinese cinema in the ‘80s and the extent to which it draws inspiration from traditional and foreign themes.