For artist Lin Lu, a first exhibition in America became a story of refusal, welcome, and vocation
By Lin Lu
Outside, it was snowing.
Inside a university office in Reno, a newly arrived Chinese artist had just been told no. She had come to ask whether the gallery space she hoped to use for a Women’s Day exhibition might still be available. It was not. The answer was firm, practical, and final.
What happened next did not look dramatic at the time. Yet nearly twenty years later, artist Lin Lu still remembers that day as one of the moments that quietly shaped her life in America.
In 2007, during her first year in the United States, Chinese American artist Lin Lu was looking for a place to hold her first public art exhibition in America. Nearly twenty years later, she found herself doing something unexpectedly similar again—writing letters, contacting institutions, and seeking public space for a new body of work shaped by exile, memory, conscience, migration, and faith.
At first, that repetition seemed almost ironic. After two decades in America, why was she still asking for room?
But over time, the answer became clear. The search was not a sign of failure. It was part of a calling. Lin Lu has never been an artist who simply waits for institutions to discover her. When she believes in the work, she begins looking for where it can stand. That was true when she was newly arrived, carrying a portfolio of bright paintings and the emotional instability of immigration. It is true now, as she seeks space for work that bears witness to the lives of displaced believers and the moral weight of history.
To understand the present search, one has to return to Reno in 2007—and to an old Chinese story about a happy fish.
The First Months
Lin Lu arrived in the United States in 2006. Like many immigrants, she was learning two landscapes at once: the visible one of streets, classrooms, and institutions, and the invisible one of loneliness, unfamiliar freedoms, and the quiet pressure of starting over.
In those early months, she painted every Saturday. Over roughly six months, she completed nearly thirty paintings. They were not the product of a career strategy. They were a way of staying alive inwardly. For Lin Lu, painting was never merely aesthetic labor. It was rest, self-translation, and emotional survival.
When she had enough work, she first showed the paintings informally in the home of her landlord, Tina Nappe. Friends came. The atmosphere was intimate and warm.
Soon, another opportunity appeared: a women’s gallery in Reno invited her to exhibit. But Lin Lu found herself drawn instead to the University of Nevada, Reno. She wanted the exhibition to be more than a private art event. She wanted it to be a moment of cultural exchange inside a community of learning.
The date mattered as well.
In China, International Women’s Day on March 8 has long been publicly visible. Women gather, workplaces sometimes organize meals, and the day carries a tone of recognition.
When Lin Lu first arrived in America, she did not know whether the same was true here. At one point, she asked an American man how Women’s Day was observed in the United States. He answered half-jokingly, “In America, women celebrate every day, so there is no need for a special March 8.”
The line amused her, but it stayed with her. She never forgot that first Women’s Day season in America, because it became the moment when her art first found wider public life.
The No
On February 20, 2007, Lin Lu went in search of a campus venue for a Women’s Day exhibition.
Her first hope was the library’s first-floor gallery. But when she asked, she was told that the space had already been committed to a photography exhibition. The arrangement had been made long in advance and could not be replaced.
Still, Lin Lu decided to ask the professor involved directly.
She went to his office on the fifth floor. The answer came immediately: no. He had already put too much effort into his exhibition, he said, and did not want to change anything.
Lin Lu explained that her flyers had already been printed with the library location. He replied that his flyers had been printed too.
There was nothing more to say.
He had every right to refuse. Lin Lu apologized politely and left.
Outside, it was snowing.
For many artists, and perhaps especially for immigrant artists, this is a familiar threshold: the point where a practical refusal can begin to sound like a verdict on one’s work, one’s place, even one’s right to ask. Lin Lu did not dramatize the rejection. But neither did she forget it.
What changed the meaning of that day happened only a few hours later.
A Daoist Turn
That same afternoon, Lin Lu taught a class in Asian art history. The subject that day was Daoism. She introduced her students to Zhuangzi, the ancient Chinese thinker known for paradox, freedom, and transformations of perspective.
Among the best-known passages in the Zhuangzi is the dialogue on the bridge above the Hao River. Zhuangzi looks at the fish swimming below and says, in effect, that one can see their freedom and know the happiness of fish. His friend Huizi protests: how can a human know what a fish feels?
The exchange asks whether joy can be recognized not only through logic, but also through presence, sympathy, and attunement.
Lin Lu asked her students to imagine and draw a “happy fish.”
Then she told them what had happened that day with the professor who had refused her request.
One young woman immediately said, “Robert is not a happy fish.”
The class burst into laughter. So did Lin Lu.
The remark was funny, but its effect was larger than the sentence itself. Something loosened. The rejection did not disappear, but it lost its heaviness. What had felt fixed suddenly became fluid again.
That shift remained central to how Lin Lu would remember the episode. She did not leave the office triumphant. She left disappointed. But after the classroom moment, she no longer carried the disappointment as final.
If one path closed, another could exist.
In later reflections, she associated this turn with wu wei, often translated as “non-forcing.” Not passivity, and not resignation. Rather, a way of moving that does not break itself against what is closed, but remains responsive to what opens elsewhere.
In a note from that season, she wrote a single line: I am a happy fish.
Mary White Stewart Opens Another Door
Soon, another door did open.
The Women’s Studies program at the University of Nevada, Reno offered its gallery space for the exhibition. Professor Mary White Stewart did more than provide a venue. She actively welcomed the work into the life of the program.
One of Lin Lu’s paintings, Colorful Woman, was selected by Stewart to appear on T-shirts and tote bags produced in connection with the Women’s Day event. Proceeds supported scholarships for students in Women’s Studies.
Posters were placed across campus. Announcements circulated online. Faculty members helped share news of the exhibition with the local Chinese community.
The practical help mattered, but so did the spirit in which it was offered.
An earlier office had responded with firmness and closure. Here, there was warmth, initiative, and imagination. Stewart did not merely permit the exhibition. She helped it become part of a larger communal event.
Years later, Lin Lu would remember not only relief, but a sense of being carried. It was as though a current of human kindness had taken hold after the earlier refusal.
March 8 in Sunlight
When March 8 arrived, the weather had changed. The campus was bright with sunlight.
Tina Nappe, who had first hosted Lin Lu’s home exhibition, bought four T-shirts and two tote bags featuring Lin Lu’s painting as gifts for friends. Many women in the Women’s Day procession wore the shirts. Lin Lu wore one too.
The scene remains vivid in memory: women from many countries moving through campus in color, paintings that had begun in private now entering communal life.
The work was no longer confined to frames on walls. It was being worn, carried, and transformed into scholarship support for students.
This changed the meaning of the show. It was no longer simply an exhibition of paintings. It had become part of a community.
And people noticed.
Dr. Carmelo Urza, Director of the University Studies Abroad Consortium, wrote on February 23, 2007:
“Lin Lu is a professor of University Studies Abroad Consortium at its Chengdu campus in China. She has been invited to UNR to teach Chinese language, culture and art. In many ways her stay in Reno represents the dynamics of the 21st century… Lin Lu, you bring joy and happiness to us through the bright beauty of your paintings and bring East and West closer together in a marvelous way. Thank you!”
Tina Nappe responded more intimately on March 8:
“Great show. You are yourself the best art. Thank you for coming to Reno.”
Hugh Shapiro, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History of East Asia, wrote on April 2, 2007:
“Powerful strokes of vision moving insight on human condition, helps people understand distant phenomena, and with sensitivity articulates passion nuanced by wisdom and feelings. Bravo!”
Other remarks during the show were less formal but equally memorable. One visitor described Colorful Woman as “strength without hardness.” Another said the paintings seemed “still becoming while we look at them.”
A student remarked that she had never imagined art could hold homesickness and joy at the same time.
Together, those responses revealed what the exhibition had accomplished. It did not merely present images. It created a space in which different people, from different backgrounds, found themselves unexpectedly addressed.
What Followed—and Why It Matters
After the exhibition, invitations began to arrive—from the Nevada Museum of Art, from a foreign languages commencement ceremony, from an international exchange center, and from a television interview program, We the People.
Carmelo later joked, “Everywhere I go, I see you. Everywhere I go, I see your paintings.”
A friend told Lin Lu, “At an age when no one expects miracles anymore, you are still making miracles happen.”
Lin Lu answered simply that once one comes to know the living God, miracles continue—one after another.
Looking back, however, the most important part of the story is not the success that followed. It is the pattern underneath it.
Lin Lu asked. She was refused. She accepted the refusal. She kept moving. Another place opened.
Now, as she once again seeks public space in America for work shaped by witness, migration, and faith, she no longer sees the act of asking as evidence that she has failed to arrive. She understands it as part of her vocation.
The artist she was in 2007 was looking for a wall in a new country.
The artist she is in 2026 is looking for room for memory, conscience, and testimony.
Those are different scales of work. But the inner line connecting them remains the same.
The “happy fish” of Zhuangzi, as Lin Lu now understands it, was never a symbol of easy circumstances. It was a symbol of fluidity—of remaining alive after disappointment, of not becoming rigid when the current changes, of moving without force and yet not giving up.
The happy fish is not the one who swims only in calm water.
It is the one who keeps swimming after rejection.
That is why the memory of Mary White Stewart matters so deeply in this story. She did not erase the existence of the first refusal. She answered it by opening another space, and in doing so changed the course of what came next.
For Lin Lu, that remains one of the most enduring lessons of American public life: institutions do not speak with one voice. One office may close; another may welcome. One person may guard a door; another may widen it.
The task of the artist is to keep moving long enough to find the second person.
Twenty years later, Lin Lu can still say, with more depth than she could have understood then: I am a happy fish.
Not because every door opened.
Not because the path was easy.
Not because recognition came immediately.
But because grace kept appearing in motion.
Lin Lu offers this remembrance in honor of Professor Mary White Stewart, whose work changed lives for the better and whose support through the Women’s Studies program helped make Lin Lu’s first Women’s Day exhibition in America possible.
