Hung Liu Oil on Canvas #426 of Baby King 1995
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The Narrative Paintings of Hung Liu
T he Polk Museum of Art has organized an exhibition of Hung Liu'south large-scale paintings in cooperation with Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Miami. Afterward emigrating from China in 1984, Liu attended the University of California, San Diego, where she received her Main of Fine Arts degree. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Mills College in Oakland, California, and her work is in collections across the country including the National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Fine art, the San 
Her paintings combine western aesthetics with Chinese subject matter, a cross-cultural alloy that communicates Liu'southward unique sense of beauty and emotion to the viewer through her extraordinarily skillful treatment of paint. Hung Liu is known for her stunning reproductions of historical photographs of Chinese life (many taken by Western visitors), which address the "cultural collisions" she faced while coming of historic period during the decade of the Cultural Revolution in Cathay. Her paintings ofttimes seem both cornball and critical, are sometimes created on shaped canvases, and always combine her skill as a photo-realistic painter with expressionistic brushwork and drips of paint. Liu recreates these scenes in such a manner that specific problems of identity are explored: identity every bit an individual, as a member of a cultural grouping, and as a foreign stereotype.
Artist's Argument:
My work of the past several years has a lot to practise with late 19th and early on 20th century photographs. In general, the photographs are of two kinds: The first kind were taken by foreign tourists in China, and the second by Chinese of themselves -- specifically of young prostitutes who were for sale. Together, these photographic bodies testify to a kind of split perception of a nation, 
Between 1860 and 1912, foreign tourists photographed the Chinese in People's republic of china. Their subjects included women with spring anxiety, dead Chinese soldiers (who were killed in fighting with European troops), and Centrolineal armies entering the Forbidden Urban center. Because they were published in the W, they have never been seen in Prc. As a body, these photographs are evidence of cultural invasion, Western voyeurism, and early forms of the media representation of exotic "others." Not merely a record of the past, these photographs are also a clear aesthetic statement and a subjective cultural choice.
The second body of photographs, which I researched recently in a Beijing film archive (where they were stored in order to save them from the book burnings of the Cultural Revolution), are taken of young Chinese prostitutes who are beingness displayed in a photo-studio setting similar products in a mail-order catalogue. Unlike the pictures taken past tourists and journalists, these turn-of-the-century images were taken by Chinese of Chinese, but with cameras imported from the West and in photograph-studios that were designed to acquaintance the women with works of European fine art, civilization, and technology. If Europeans trained their cameras on the exotic East, the Chinese turned those same cameras dorsum on themselves. The more I study the photographs, the more evidence of Euro-centric aesthetic influence in Chinese mod culture I notice. As an creative person, I effort to represent that evidence in my work.
With these images, I am exploring the questions of personal and national identity every bit they drift across the concepts and experiences of "homeland" and "new home." A photograph is e'er taken nether sure conditions: it is site-specific and time-spring. Information technology is involved in a sophisticated kind of storage called memory. Over time, the lack of documented background information nigh a photo, its changes in terms of value and interest, and fifty-fifty its natural chemic disuse, add to it a blurred and mysterious veil. A unique document can become a generic sign. All generic signs together create a collective bias, a cultural stereotype for both insiders and outsiders. I am especially interested in the larger ideas of identity that might exist suggested in photographs whose subjects are anonymous, lost, without identity, and in transition between two times and ii places. For me, these ii photograph bodies reinforce that sense of transition. I also promise they will contribute to the question for identity for other Asian-American artists every bit well.
Biographical Information from the Exhibition:
The Polk Museum of Fine art has organized an exhibition of Hung Liu's big-scale paintings in cooperation with Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Miami. After emigrating from China in 1984, Ms. Liu attended the University of California, San Diego, where she received her Primary of Fine Arts degree. She is currently an Acquaintance Professor of Fine art at Mills College in Oakland, California, and her work is in major museum collections across the land including the National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC, the Los Angeles County Museum of Fine art, the Dallas Museum of Fine art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Jose Museum of Fine art, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art & Blueprint. In 1989 and 1991, Ms. Liu received fellowship awards from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Hung Liu'south paintings combine western aesthetics with Chinese subject affair, a cross-cultural blend that communicates Liu's unique sense of dazzler and emotion to the viewer through her extraordinarily skillful treatment of pigment. She is known for her stunning reproductions of historical photographs of Chinese life (many taken past Western visitors), which address the "cultural collisions" she faced while coming of age during the decade of the Cultural Revolution in Cathay. Her paintings ofttimes seem both nostalgic and disquisitional, are sometimes created on shaped canvases, and always combine her skill as a photograph-realistic painter with expressionistic brushwork and drips of paint. Ms. Liu recreates these scenes in such a style that specific issues of identity are explored: identity every bit an individual, equally a member of a cultural group, and equally a strange stereotype.
Though painting from photographs is not an uncommon practise among artists, Ms. Liu uses this technique to explore very specific and special topics. Her experiences with the negative side of recent Chinese history has been real and direct. Her begetter was imprisoned effectually the fourth dimension of her nascency. At age 20, she and other students were shipped out to the countryside to do hard labor. After painting in secret during her four years in the rice fields, she was sent to Beijing where she began to report Russian Social Realism (propaganda) at one of People's republic of china's top fine art schools.
She thinks of her paintings every bit simultaneous destructions of and creations from the photographs. After studying the photographs to "wait under" them, Ms. Liu uses paint to dissolve them, allowing the present to address problematic problems in recent Chinese history while likewise looking for bonds, similarities, and, ultimately, resolution. She often takes a footstep further past surrounding the photography-based images with traditional Chinese motifs such as Buddhas, lotus blossoms, and others that seem to have come directly from ancient Chinese scrolls. In this fashion, Ms. Liu has tied her art to the greater tradition of Chinese art, while creating works that could only have been made inside the contemporary world of American art.
The Museum would similar to limited its appreciation to Bernice Steinbaum and her staff at Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Miami for bringing this exhibition together for the Polk County community.
Read more articles and essays concerning this institutional source by visiting the sub-index page for the Polk Museum of Art in Resource Library Magazine.
Search for more manufactures and essays on American art in Resource Library. See America's Distinguished Artists for biographical information on historic artists.
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