Winter Blossom, #14

Hung Liu
Printmaking
2011

Academy Hall, Second Floor

Born in China in 1948 under the Maoist regime, Hung Liu has been described as “the greatest Chinese painter in the US.” Through oil painting with washes of linseed oil, site-specific murals and installations, drawing, photography, printmaking, and mixed media, she primarily depicts historical and contemporary Chinese and American people. She photographs contemporary figures - prostitutes, prisoners, workers, refugees, street performers - but utilizes historical Chinese and American photography as the basis of her portrait and figurative painting. Through a technique of washing, dripping, and dissolving paint, a palette of bold and vibrant colors, and a mixture of historical and contemporary symbolism, she merges the past with the present, and reframes history through a contemporary lens: “Liu has invented a kind of weeping realism that surrenders to the erosion of memory and the passage of time, while also bringing faded photographic images vividly to life as rich, facile paintings. She summons the ghosts of history to the present. In effect, Liu turns old photographs into new paintings.”
 
In the early 1970s, while living in China, the artist was being trained in the strict Social Realist style required of Chinese artists at the time. She secretly made small landscape paintings at great personal and family risk. This need to explore and express her thoughts has remained with her throughout her illustrious career.
 
In Midsummer, #10 , Hung Liu summons another mysterious and beautiful figure from China’s imperial past. This mixed media work features her personal style of dripping paint and layered brushstrokes. Combining a mixture of Chinese culture, contemporary and ancient visual language, Lui addresses history, gender, identity and Chinese politics and culture. With a focus on women and their vulnerable position in society, Hung Lui elevates her central singular figures and emphasizes their dignity imbuing her richly decorated subjects with hope.
 
After earning a BFA in Art and Art Education from The Beijing Teachers College in 1975 and a Graduate Degree in Mural Painting from the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing in 1981, she immigrated to America and received an MFA in Visual Art from The University of California San Diego (UCSD) in 1986.
 
Her work has been collected by major institutions such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, as well as private collections and has been extensively exhibited in solo and group shows around the world. Her retrospective “Summoning Ghosts: The Art and Life of Hung Liu” presented by the Oakland Museum, toured nationally in 2015. Among her many awards, she is a two-time recipient of The National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Painting, and received a Lifetime Achievement Award in Printmaking from The Southern Graphics Council in 2011. She has also been commissioned for several public art installations, including at the San Francisco International Airport, and is a Professor Emerita at Mills College, where she taught since 1990.