Name Hung Liu | Role Artist | |
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Artwork Mulan: Camping During the War | ||
Artist s talk hung liu
Hung Liu (刘虹) (born February 17, 1948) is a Chinese-born American contemporary artist. One of the first Chinese artists to establish a career in the West, Liu is regarded by many as "the greatest Chinese painter in the US."
Contents
- Artist s talk hung liu
- Summoning ghosts the art of hung liu part iv gertrude stein
- Early life and work in China
- My Secret Freedom paintings
- Immigration and Resident Alien exhibition
- Jiu Jin Shan Old Gold Mountain
- Hung Liu A Ten Year Survey 1988 1998
- Strange Fruit New Paintings by Hung Liu
- Going Away Coming Home airport installation
- Summoning Ghosts retrospective
- Awards and achievements
- Notable exhibitions
- Publications and reviews
- References
Liu’s paintings typically feature layered brushstrokes combined with washes of linseed oil which gives the imagery an indistinct and drippy appearance. Various commenters have suggested that this visual strategy's surrealism and its absence of Socialist political drive can be seen as the opposite of (or a rejoinder to) the rigid academicism of the Chinese Socialist Realist style in which Liu was trained. It has also been characterized as a metaphor for the loss of historical memory: the dripping in Liu's paintings is described by art critic Bill Berkson as “analogous to memory” and how “[memory] is blurred.” Given the pathos that often infuses her works, her painting style has been described by Liu's partner, critic and curator Jeff Kelley, as a kind of "weeping realism."
Liu's paintings and prints often make use of anonymous Chinese historical photographs, particularly those of women, children, refugees, and soldiers, as subject matter. Many are drawn from the artist's personal collection of 19th century Chinese photographs, a large portion of which feature prostitutes. Liu believes her paintings “gives a spirit to them, the forgotten.” As curator Réne de Guzman writes, her paintings bring details of Chinese history and memory into the present for American viewer. Writing for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Kelley suggests that Liu's paintings "challenge the documentary authority of historical photographs by subjecting them to the more reflective process of painting [...] Much of the meaning in her paintings comes from the way the washes and drips dissolve the photo-based images, suggesting the passage of memory into history."
Since the late 1990s Liu has occasionally taken historical photographs of non-Chinese women, refugees, migrants, workers, and children as a point of departure. Her Strange Fruit paintings of the early to mid 2000s depicted Korean "comfort women" forced to serve as prostitutes for Japanese soldiers in the second World War. Several of her paintings draw imagery from the portrait and documentary photographs of the Chinese populace by John Thomson. In her American Exodus series, Liu addresses American subject matter, creating images of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression after the photographs of Dorothea Lange.
Although thought of predominantly as a painter, her body of work moves fluidly between painting, mixed-media and site-specific installation. Pieces such Goddess of Love/Goddess of Liberty incorporate significant mixed-media elements (often antique or hand-made objects) either installed in close proximity to or mounted directly onto the piece. Liu cites her installation work as a continuation of the principles she utilizes as a muralist "an ability to work in large scale and to take the site specificity of the situation into account. Creating an installation merely required pushing the work out into the third dimension". Liu's paintings also often incorporate a sculptural dimensionality through the use of custom canvases shaped to the contours of their subject matter.
Summoning ghosts the art of hung liu part iv gertrude stein
Early life and work in China
Hung Liu was born in Changchun, People's Republic, China, in 1948. In 1970, two years after the beginning of China's Cultural Revolution, Liu was sent to Da Dulianghe, a small village in the Beijing countryside, where she lived and worked among the local villagers. She attended Beijing Teachers College in 1975 and studied mural painting as a graduate student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. As a student Liu's art education had strict limits; the constrained and academic style which students were forced to emulate has been likened by Liu to paint-by-numbers. Although the use of cameras to aid painting was prohibited, Liu rebelled by secretly taking photographs of local farmers in Da Dulianghe with their families and making drawings of them.
My Secret Freedom paintings
Liu also disobeyed the ban against non-sanctioned art of the Maoist Regime in her series called “My Secret Freedom." These miniature landscape paintings, created during Liu's time at Da Dulianghe, depict scenes of everyday life. Their title refers to the rebellion inherent in their creation: Liu had to hide a small paint box and brushes beneath her coat and painted each tiny image quickly. Jeff Kelley writes that Liu's "intent was radical in China at the time: to paint not in the service of state ideology or party dicta, but simply to paint. To paint for the sheer pleasure of painting."
Immigration and Resident Alien exhibition
Liu immigrated to the United States in 1984. She is a class of 1986 alumna of the University of California, San Diego.
As resident artist at Capp Street Project in San Francisco in 1988, Liu painted a series of works whose main focus was the issue of identity as it relates to immigrant status. Among these was the eponymous Resident Alien. This was Liu's first self-portrait, in which the artist painted an enlarged version of her own green card with several pointed changes, e.g. her birthdate of 1948 becoming 1984, the date of her immigration, and her name comically replaced by the words "Fortune Cookie." The off-site exhibition of these works brought Liu her first major art world attention; the painting Resident Alien also subsequently received numerous treatments and interpretations by scholars of gender identity and women's studies as well as art historians. Dong Isbister proposes that Resident Alien is best understood via a 'diasporic consciousness,' as Liu asks her audience to "examine how her body is positioned and portrayed in relation to legal, racial, and gender issues based on immigration." The painting evidences the “tension between an ethnic, a national and a transnational identity”; at the same time, Liu "shows resistance to being assimilated into the stereotypes imposed upon her by inserting her own voice." In 1988, as part of her Capp Street Project residency, Liu produced a mural, Reading Room, for the Chinese for Affirmative Action Community Room in San Francisco's Chinatown.
"Jiu Jin Shan (Old Gold Mountain)"
Liu's installation work Jiu Jin Shan (Old Gold Mountain) (1994) was originally commissioned by the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum. In this work, Liu created a "gold mountain" made of 200,000 fortune cookies, engulfing a crossroads of railroad tracks. The junction of the tracks references the cultural intersection of East and West, as well as the Chinese immigrants who perished during the building of the Sierra Nevada stage of the transcontinental railroad. Jiu Jin Shan (Old Gold Mountain) was also installed at the Mills College Art Museum in 2013 as part of the exhibition Hung Liu: Offerings.
Hung Liu: A Ten-Year Survey, 1988-1998
A ten-year retrospective of Liu's work traveled nationally in 1998 and 1999, appearing at venues including: College of Wooster Art Museum, Wooster, Ohio (March-June, 1998); John and Margaret Muscarelle Museum of Art, Williamsburg, Virginia (August-October, 1998); Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri (November-December 1998); University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California (January-March, 1999); Bowdin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine (April-June, 1999); and Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, North Carolina (September-November, 1999).
Strange Fruit: New Paintings by Hung Liu
In 2002-2003 Strange Fruit: New Paintings by Hung Liu traveled to venues including: Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, Arizona (January 26 - April 28, 2002); Boise Art Museum, Boise, Idaho (June 1 - August 4, 2002); Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California (October 27 - February 23, 2003); and Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California (March 8 - May 4, 2003).
"Going Away, Coming Home" airport installation
In November 2006, Liu's public art installation Going Away, Coming Home was unveiled at the Oakland International Airport. The installation is a 160-foot long wall of windows in the Terminal 2 concourse. The installation was commissioned by the Port of Oakland for $300,000.
The installation depicts 80 cranes that are meant to comfort and give blessings to people who are leaving their homes or returning from travel. Liu was inspired by a silk Chinese scroll painting from the 12th century, which also depicts cranes symbolizing good luck. Liu painted the work with enamel in her signature style of allowing the paint to drip. To make the work, she collaborated with the 140-year-old German glass fabrication company Derix Glasstudios.
Summoning Ghosts retrospective
Summoning Ghosts: The Art of Hung Liu was a retrospective collection of Liu’s work, including around 80 paintings and an assortment of photographs, studies, and sketchbooks. It remains the most extensive exhibit of her work to date, with paintings from more than 40 collections displayed. The exhibit featured works from throughout Hung Liu’s artistic career, beginning from the late 1960s; these paintings draw upon her personal history and experience of the Maoist regime, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, as well as drawing from themes of Ancient China. Réne de Guzman, the chief curator at the Oakland Museum of California, organized the exhibit in collaboration with Hung Liu. The artist describes the exhibit as a “…full circle… [Comprising] where I come from, what I was interested in, and what was possible to do in China.”
Summoning Ghosts opened at the Oakland Museum of California on March 16, 2013. The exhibit travelled to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in October 2014 and finished its tour at the Palm Springs Art Museum.
Awards and achievements
Liu has received numerous awards, including two painting fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Joan Mitchell Fellowship. In 2011 she received an SGC International Award for Lifetime Achievement in Printmaking from the Southern Graphics Council. Other awards include a Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) award and a Eureka Fellowship.
Her work has been exhibited extensively and collected by institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
She is currently the Professor Emerita of Painting at Mills College in Oakland, California, where she taught from 1990 until retiring in 2014.
Notable exhibitions
In addition to the exhibitions discussed above, Liu's work has appeared in exhibitions and venues including the following: