From September 20, 2025 through April 26, 2026, the Chinese American Museum of Chicago (CAMOC) is excited to present Ruyell Ho and Li Lin Lee: Language of Abstraction. This show features selected work by two artists of Chinese descent born in Asia and came to Chicago, where their studio practices since the 1970's have explored abstraction to directly and indirectly re-envision language visually.

In a city known for its own brand of Surrealist and Pop Art-influenced figuration, both have continued to forge separate but parallel paths, doggedly creating their own lexicon centered on the form, structure, and mechanics that is the “body” of the written as ideogrammic and calligraphic over the past fifty years.

The show grounds Ho and Lin's work in conversation with one another within Chicago's art historical movements, and the hints at familial story, legacy, and possibility evolved across great swaths of time and place.

‍

Ruyell Ho was born in Shanghai in 1936, and educated in Hong Kong before immigrating to the United States to attend college in 1955. He received a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley as well as a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Art Institute of Chicago. Ho was a professor of painting and lecturer at Bradley University. A painter associated with the Chicago Imagist group, or “Hairy Who,” which included artists such as Roger Brown, Jim Nutt, and Ed Paschke, Ruyell’s deep connections to the Chicago art community include having worked for over 20 years as an art and architectural photographer in addition to making and exhibiting his work. He has exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, The Erie Street Gallery, The Illinois Center, The Center for Contemporary Art in Geneva, Switzerland and the Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, California.

While his work is often described as Biomorphic Abstraction*, his interests are expansive—demonstrating investment in the profundity of language, formal poetics and conceptual economies--all manifested through the compulsively prolific production of drawings, sculptures, videos, and photographs.

His tireless investigation into the shape in solitude as well as the constantly shifting landscape of figure versus ground have a direct connection to his search for the terms to define his own identity and its specific points of connection to his surroundings. The voluminous selection of images presented here function like film stills, portraying one constantly shifting character in perpetual motion.

Li Lin Lee was born in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1955, then immigrated to the United States with his family in
1962. Lee graduated from the University of Pittsburgh and has exhibited widely since 1988 in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. His paintings and prints are represented in museums such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and the Hallmark Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. Lee is also represented in many corporate and private collections, including the Vera List Foundation, Prudential Insurance, Citibank, US State Department, and many others. His younger brother is the famed poet Li-Young Lee.

In his artistic process, Lee plays with paint and follows his instincts, letting go of the instinctual need for control. For him, it is exciting to not know what is going to happen next. Each of his works has multiple layers of paint and passages, with a story and questions emerging as the eye excavates the surface. He likes working in small scale, believing that smaller works contain a more concentrated energy that the eye can encompass intimately. Lee hopes his paintings will encourage contemplation and raise questions about time, memory, purpose, suffering, and finally, joy.