Name |
Hung Liu (Or Liu Hung*) |
Background |
Chinese |
Birthplace |
Changchun, People's Republic, China |
Medium |
Painting |
*In China Surname is often first
She is most well known for her paintings over traditional Chinese historical photography.
With an overlay of traditional Chinese birds, flowers, insects, dragons, and most recently stylized human figures, Liu offers her subjects artistic evidence of their own rich heritage as if to remind or comfort them.+
This quote resonated with me in particular because of how much it made sense. She layers traditional Chinese cultural symbols of these portraits in order to comfort them. Often I feel the need to be comforted by art and rarely do I see myself reflected in artwork. Hung Liu uses images and layers as a way of representation, and cultural significance. Which is a pretty big deal! Further more the images she chooses were taken in a time of socialism where the rules of society, especially for women, were very strict. By painting on top of them she is rewriting history in a sense. Liberating the rigid methodology of socialist realism
One of my favorite exhibitions that I've researched with Hung Liu's work is called "Bad Women" a 1991 San Francisco Exhibit where she used photos of Chinese prostitutes as the foundation for her paintings.
Liu discovered the photographs that inspired the images at a public archive while visiting Beijing earlier that year. They were arranged in two books that had apparently served as catalogs for wealthy male customers. Strangely, the collection of photographs of prostitutes, like sexism itself, survived through the Japanese invasions, the civil war between the nationalists and communists, and the Cultural Revolution. Discovering these photographs was immensely important to Liu for a number of reasons: first, because of her desire to uncover pre-communist Chinese life; second, because of her keen interest in unexpected connections between China and the West; third, because of her wish to document in her art the forgotten lives of anonymous people, especially women, who have most often been the victims rather than the victors of History; and fourth, because of her focus on the interplay of illusions and gazes as she painted the photographs of women posed in front of paintings so that contemporary Western viewers might look at her looking at what the Chinese used Western technology to look at. #
Liu's artwork gives life to these "anonymous" women ( something absolutely amazing to me if you couldn't tell!) She gives them a voice and a remembered presence not to be further victimized but canonized in a way. I'm really in love with her work, feel free to let me know what you think in the comments!
Additional sources
+ http://www.kelliu.com/
#Kim, Elaine H. "`Bad Women': Asian American Visual Artists Hanh Thi Pham, Hung Liu, And Yong Soon Min."Feminist Studies 22.3 (1996): 573. Art & Architecture Complete. Web. 22 Aug. 2015.