Struggle, Hope and Beauty

California-based Chinese-American oil painter Huihan Liu loves the writings of Ernest Hemingway, particularly “The Old Man and the Sea,” so much that many years ago, he made an oil painting inspired by the book. “When I was in graduate school, we had a final project involving literature and painting,” he says. “And one of my paintings was The Old Man and the Sea.” There was something in the story that spoke to him, he says—the difficulty, the struggle, the endurance, the refusal to lose hope even in the face of crushing misfortune.

Unlike most of his other paintngs, The Old Man and the Sea was never displayed in a gallery or offered for sale. For more than 30 years, it hung in Liu’s office where he could see it every day. “It meant a lot to me,” he says. “And then a collector of my work happened to become aware of the painting and connected with it—and then somehow we connected.” The collector also had a deep affinity for Hemingway’s work, and Liu agreed to sell it to him.

But the intangibles that painting symbolized—struggle, persistence and not losing hope—remain with Liu. “I still think about those things a lot as I get older,” he says.

Read the full article in the March/April 2026 issue.