Hung Lui (Chinese, 1948-2021)

Hung Liu was born in Changchun China in 1948. She trained in the Socialist Realist style and studied mural painting as a graduate student at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. In 1984, Liu immigrated to the United States to attend the University of California, San Diego.

Liu is known for creating paintings based on historical Chinese photographs. Her subjects over the years have been prostitutes, refugees, street performers, soldiers, laborers, and prisoners, among others. Liu creates a weeping realism that surrenders to the erosion of memory and the passage of time, while also bringing faded photographic images vividly to life in her paintings. Liu was inspired by her encounter with commercial-studio photographs portraying various Chinese female types in pre-revolutionary China. She became fascinated by the shifting meanings that result when a historical photograph is separated from its original context and began incorporating such imagery into her paintings. 

Painting is an opportunity for Liu to challenge the documentary authority of historical photographs by subjecting them to the reflective process of painting. She adds layers of meaning to her images through the use of washes and drips that dissolve the documentary images, suggesting the passage of memory into history, while also working to uncover the cultural and personal narratives fixed, but often hidden, in the photographic instant. Liu’s painting style combines these historical photographs with imagery and motifs from Chinese painting, as well as objects like ancient Chinese pottery and bronzes.

While Chinese history remains the essence of her work, in the last few years, Liu has spent more time with American subjects. By training her attention on the displaced individuals and wandering families of the American Dust Bowl, Liu finds a landscape of overarching struggle and underlying humanity that for her is familiar terrain, having been raised in China during an era of epic revolution, tumult, and displacement.

In addition to painting, Liu makes use of photography and mixed media to explore the human condition, both in China and in the United States. During the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, Liu took photographs of peasants in the village where she worked for four years. The photographs are another medium through which Liu explores the human condition and demonstrates her experience of history as an active presence.

A two-time recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in painting, Liu also received a Lifetime Achievement Award in Printmaking from the Southern Graphics Council International in 2011. Liu’s works have been exhibited extensively and collected by 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 of San Francisco, and the Los Angeles County Museum, among others. Liu currently lives in Oakland, California. She is Professor Emerita at Mills College, where she has taught since 1990.

Written by Jennie Hord

Sources

http://www.hungliu.com/

https://www.artsy.net/artist/hung-liu

https://nmwa.org/explore/artist-profiles/hung-liu