In 2008, I accompanied a graduate student delegation sponsored by Applied Materials to visit the University of California, Berkeley. The trip was arranged with hopes of meeting Dr. Chenming Hu, but he was away from his laboratory that day, leaving his students to host our group instead. Looking back years later, what stands out most vividly in my memory—aside from the academic shrine of a semiconductor pioneer—are several splash-ink paintings hanging inside the lab that seemed completely detached from transistors, fabrication processes, and physics equations.