Hu Li always told me that he had deep feelings for Ningbo and wanted to keep the best works in his hometown. On the morning of May 8, the Hu Li Art Exhibition Hall was unveiled in Hall 1 of Ningbo Art Museum. At the scene, Li Ping, the wife of the late Chinese-American artist Hu Li, and many of his relatives and friends came from home and abroad to witness this moment. At the same time, li Ping donated 120 works of art created by Hu Li to the Ningbo Art Museum in accordance with Hu Li's last wishes.
Hu Li, whose ancestral home is Zhenhai, Ningbo, was born in Shanghai in 1950 and is a famous oil painter. In 1986, Hu Li graduated from the Oil Painting Department of the Academy of Fine Arts of Shanghai University and stayed on to teach in the same year. In 1990, Hu Li went to South Dakota State University to study, received a master of fine arts degree in 1993, and taught at the University of Wisconsin the following year, where he became a tenured full professor in 2000. On April 15, 2016, Hu Li died of ineffective medical treatment.
During his study abroad, Hu Li completed a number of works in a variety of Western painting styles, which greatly enriched and perfected his personal creative style. In the subsequent creative career, Hu Li's international creative ability to integrate Chinese and foreign countries has been brought into full play, and many of his works have attracted wide attention from all walks of life in the United States and have been highly praised by the art world.
Among the works donated by Hu Li to the Ningbo Art Museum, the huge oil paintings "Two Birds Left by Nuwa" and "Nanjing Massacre" are his representative works, which can best reflect his ideological power and artistic imagination.
The landmark work "The Two Birds Left by Nuwa" was completed in 1995 and took 3 months. Borrowing the allusions of "Nuwa Patching Heaven" and "Noah's Ark", the work uses two large birds shaped like boats to carry people of all colors; at the same time, there are people with wings but entangled in ropes in the air, there are some teams on the ground that build ladders and pull ropes as climbs, and the characters who flock to the left are walking towards the empty hole in the center... This work is extremely mystical and leaves people with a wide space for imagination.
Because my grandfather and many villagers died in the indiscriminate bombardment of Japanese fascism, the hatred of the national enemy provided the original impetus for the painter to create "Nanjing Massacre". In order to expose the heinous crimes committed by the Japanese fascists in China to the Western people, Hu Li spent more than three years collecting and studying historical materials, constantly using various methods to strengthen the artistic appeal, and finally completed an epic large-scale oil painting "Nanjing Massacre". Li Ping said that when the work was exhibited in Beijing, many art museums wanted to collect it, but in the end, Hu Li wanted to keep it in Ningbo.
The work is in the form of a Chinese scroll, and the picture consists of three sections from right to left: the beginning of the volume exposes the crimes committed by the Japanese army against Chinese women; the middle five small sections - the moment when the Japanese army killed Chinese soldiers by the emperor's order, the mountain of corpses, the heads of figures composed of the names of innocent civilians killed by the massacre, twelve portraits of civilians killed by the Japanese army, and the scene of the nanjing city gate being burned by the war; and the group portrait of the dying at the end of the volume shows the group portraits moving towards death. The basis for the creation of this work is Hu Li's profound reflection on the anti-intellectual and anti-cultural excesses in the human will.
"The precious works donated by Hu Li this time have greatly enriched the government collection of Ningbo and played a strong role in promoting the cause of literature and art in Ningbo." Han Licheng, director of the Ningbo Art Museum, told reporters that ningbo art museum has always had a planned and large-scale collection of works by famous Artists of Yong nationality, and set up exhibition halls in a timely manner to study and inherit their fruitful artistic achievements. In this way, he wants to make the works of famous artists take root, influence generations of Ningbo people, and actively promote the continuous inheritance, development and innovation of academic research.
(Text = Zhu Yiqiong)