hung liu

Born in Changchun, China, 1948
Studied at Beijing Teachers College (B.F.A., 1975); Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing (M.F.A. equivalent, 1981); and University of California, San Diego (M.F.A., 1986)
Lives and works in Oakland, California
Teaches at Mills College, Oakland

artist's statement from 2003
Because I am looking for the mythic pose beneath the human figure, I derive my subjects from historical photographs taken in China, and of Chinese people. These become the basis for my paintings and prints, into which I introduce motifs from traditional Chinese painting, sometimes dating back as far as 2,000 years. These motifs, including images of birds, flowers, calligraphic writing, and segments of ancient landscapes, are suspended in the photo-based fields of the paintings and prints, allowing multiple layers of historical representation to co-exist in a manner resulting, I think, in a kind of mutually liberating tension.

This interweaving of images from the ancient and modern past continues my interest in a contemporary form of history painting in which the subjects from one era witness and comment upon those of another, keeping the idea of history open and fluid.

In these two new prints this creative tension exists both in stylistic and narrative terms. They may be seen as a diptych in which the young girls are understood as prior incarnations of the older, worn women, or perhaps members of a future optimistic generation with more possibilities open to them.

artist's statement from 2000
"Live in the layers, not on the litter." Stanley Kunitz
As a painter, my primary subjects-most often Chinese women caught in historical circumstances-are based in history and derived from photography. Often, I have used the photographic images as elements in my prints. With my new Tamarind lithographs, I have chosen to draw the images by hand on stone. In this case, they consist of Chinese children from the early years of the twentieth century who were forced by necessity to work or beg for their family's livelihood. The children are accompanied by various over-scale images of flowers and animals derived from traditional Chinese paintings, the earliest being the Jin Dynasty, around the fourth century. I think of these images from the past as witnesses to the children's labor, as well as their cultural companions and comparatively innocent contrasts. It almost seems the animals are better fed and, as art, kept. Meanwhile, the prints' pale red backgrounds are taken from a standard, old fashioned calligraphy chart used throughout China by children to practice writing. The chart, with equally divided, boxed Chinese characters, forms a grid, which, in the print, forces the images up to the surface it flattens and maps. This chart, with its intimation of the rote discipline of writing in school, is the only image I did not draw by hand. There, together on the surface, the images overlay each other with suggestions of innocence and brute survival. They incite a dialogue between modern and ancient times, artistic styles, and historical categories. Therefore, history is somewhat playing out before our eyes. It is alive, or at least not static. Our history is not history yet.

selected recent exhibitions
2003	Strange Fruit: New Paintings by Hung Liu, Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California (traveled) Women on the Verge, University Gallery, Gainesville, Florida From Stone and Plate: Contemporary Prints from Tamarind Institute, Phoebe Conley Art Gallery, California State University, Fresno
2002	Painterly Proofs, Print by Hung Liu, de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, California Hung Liu, Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, California Oakland Portraits: Then and Now, 1825-2002, Oakland Art Gallery, California Parallels and Intersections: Art/Women/California 1950-2000, San Jose Museum of Art, California First Impressions: The Paulson Press, San Jose Museum of Art, California
2001	Beyond the Frame: Hung Liu, Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee Text and Subtext, Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Sweden (traveled) Digital Printmaking Now, Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York Expanded Visions: Four Women Artists Print the American West, Women of the West Museum, Denver, Colorado Hiu Yin (Echoes), Mabel Smith Douglass Library, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Miami, Florida The View From Here - Issues of Cultural Identity in Contemporary Russian and American Art, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Selected Public Collections Dallas Museum of Art, Texas Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Indiana The Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York Kempner Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri Los Angeles County Museum, California Mills College, Oakland, California Muscarelle Museum of Art, College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC Oakland Museum of California Rutgers Archives for Printmaking Studios at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, New Jersey San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco - H.M. de Young Memorial Museum San Jose Museum of Art, California Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence University of Arizona, Tucson The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York