#38 - Hung Liu
This month one of my favorite artists passed away. Her work inspired me to become interested in not just art history, but museums and the history of China as well. I first saw one of her paintings at the Sheldon Art Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska as an undergraduate at UNL. A 100 level class on Visual Literacy tasked me with a visit to the museum, to pick out a painting and describe it using the 5 senses as lenses. I was immediately entranced by Meal II. It's heavy paint is liberally applied, yet also dripping down the canvas, the lack of gaze from the three subjects, the interfering branch of cherry blossoms all worked to ensnare my attention and in response I sank down to the attending bench to experience the piece.
Hung Liu was born in Changchun, China in 1948. She grew up during the political instability in China during the 50s and during the Cultural Revolution. In the late 1960s she was sent to a proletarian re-education camp in the countryside working in the fields. In the 1970s she continues her art education, specializing in murals. In 1984 Liu attended graduate school at the University of California San Diego where she starts to network with fellow artists and exhibit her work in the US. Ever since then she has painted many, many works and exhibited in venues all over the US and China. Preceding the opening of Summoning Ghosts: The Art of Hung Liu in 2013 at the Oakland Museum of California, Liu toured universities and museums lecturing about her work. I was fortunate enough to not just attend a lecture, but to meet her and speak with her for a few minutes.
With such a long career, clearly Hung Liu has gone through artistic style shifts as well as subject changes. She has depicted all sorts of aspects of Chinese and Chinese American history from the Dowager Empress Cixi to Idahoan Chinese Americans, but she has also had a significant focus on desperate living situations like the Cultural Revolution in China and the Great Depression in the US. Her works are not often happy, they tend toward melancholy, yet not dark. By using linseed oil, she was able to create the running effect, which has been described as a sort of weeping realism, which I find to also create a feeling of loss of the past, of history. Its not a nostalgic loss for the past, but rather the sadness when remembering dark and forgotten parts of our history and memories. I find there is always something in these paintings that does hint to brighter things in the future.
I was upset to learn of Hung Liu's passing this month as an exhibition of her work is set to open at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC at the end of this month, Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands.
As Kim Sajet, Director of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, expressed in memoriam to Hung Liu:
"The National Portrait Gallery mourns the death of Hung Liu, whose extraordinary artistic vision reminds us that even in the midst of despair, there is hope, and when people help each other, there is joy. She believed in the power of art - and portraiture - to change the world."
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