Hexiang Hu

Colophon

The Site

This is my corner of the web — an archive of projects, publications, and occasional news. Originally architected by Hexiang Hu in 2016, it was renovated by Grok and Cursor in 2026. It is a static site built with Jekyll, hosted on GitHub Pages, with the source available on GitHub.

Design

The design is a monochrome, editorial take inspired by x.ai: near-black chrome, numbered section markers, and plenty of whitespace. Text is set in Inter; the small caps, dates, and micro-labels use IBM Plex Mono. A light and a dark theme follow your system preference — or the moon button in the bottom-left corner.

The Art

Every piece of artwork here was generated with models I helped build, using Grok Imagine:

  • The aurora cover at the top of each page (and its painted twin).
  • The animated thumbnails in the project list.
  • The portrait’s hidden counterpart — hover over my photo on the homepage to find it.

Under the Hood

There is no front-end framework: the project list is rendered client-side with jQuery and JsRender from a single YAML file, and a little vanilla JavaScript drives the theme toggle, the news archive, and the scroll-reveal effects. All motion respects your prefers-reduced-motion setting.

The Epigraph

The line on the cover comes from the preface of Romain Rolland’s Vie de Michel-Ange (1907):

Il n’y a qu’un héroïsme au monde : c’est de voir le monde tel qu’il est, — et de l’aimer.

There is only one heroism in the world: to see the world as it is — and to love it.

Rolland — French writer, 1915 Nobel laureate in Literature — placed the sentence at the end of an argument, not at the beginning of a consolation. In the same preface he refuses to “erect statues of unreachable heroes” and condemns “the cowardly idealism that turns its eyes away from life’s miseries and the soul’s weaknesses”; the heroic lie, he says, is a form of cowardice. The book itself is the middle volume of his Lives of Illustrious Men trilogy — Beethoven, Michelangelo, Tolstoy — portraits of geniuses defined less by their triumphs than by how much reality they managed to bear.

The power of the line is that it demands two things that rarely coexist. Seeing the world as it is means giving up every flattering illusion — and clear sight alone tends to curdle into cynicism. Loving it without that sight would be mere sentimentality, the very idealism Rolland despised. The heroism he means lives in the em-dash between the two halves: love as a decision made after the evidence is in, not before.

Chinese readers may know the line through Fu Lei’s translation of the trilogy (《名人传》), where it has settled into the widely quoted form: 「世界上只有一种英雄主义，就是在认清生活的真相之后依然热爱生活。」

It stays on the cover because it doubles as a fair description of the work here: building models that learn to see the world as it is — and models that make something beautiful out of it anyway.