Hung Liu: The Long Way Home; Grace Museum Exhibition Catalogue

1

Catalogue sponsored by

Turner Carroll Gallery 725 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501 505.986.9800 turnercarrollgallery.com info@turnercarrollgallery.com Š2019 Turner Carroll Gallery Essay: Sally Sasz Design: Sally Sasz Photography: courtesy of the artist Front Cover: (Untitled) Mother and Child, 2016 mixed media on panel 41 x 41 in.

Back Cover: Summer with Cynical Fish, 2014 oil on canvas 60 x 72 in.

All works courtesy of Turner Carroll Gallery unless otherwise noted

HUNG LIU

HUNG LIU: THE LONG WAY HOME “Home” was a fraught concept to Hung Liu while growing up in China under Mao Zedong’s communist regime. Born in Changchun in 1948, Liu was forced to migrate from place to place due to famine, re-education, and desperation. As a result, she has spent her life as an artist creating “home” in her paintings for herself and the other souls needing somewhere to rest.

During her childhood, the Chinese government threatened Liu’s family, freedom, and art. Her father was imprisoned when she was an infant for resisting the communists, and her mother was consequently driven to destroy all of their family photographs in order to avoid further retaliation.

At the age of eleven, Liu and her mother fled to Beijing, just barely surviving Mao’s Great Leap Forward, an economic and social campaign that resulted in massive famine between 1959 and 1961. In 1968. At the age of twenty, Liu was forced to move to the Chinese countryside to toil in the wheat and rice fields as part of the government’s “re-education” program, a tyrannical mandate which strove to suppress the intellectual class. She labored tirelessly for 364 days a year for a period of four years. Liu’s “Village Portrait: Three Little Fishermen” and “Grandma I,” highlight peasants in the countryside village where she was forced to work. Backed with gold leaf, these duotone images memorialize the resiliency of the human spirit. While Mao’s regime undermined Liu’s concept of home in her youth, this strife inspired Liu to develop a home away from home through her artistic practice.

Hung Liu began her formal artistic education at The Central Academy of Art in Beijing where she was trained in Socialist Realism— an idealized, propaganda-infused style that promoted the Mao regime. During this time in China, she felt restricted, as many styles and subjects were deemed inappropriate by the government. Still, her fearless and tenacious spirit allowed her to challenge these boundaries, rebelling through loose washes of color and liberal drips of paint.

In 1984, Liu migrated to the United States to pursue her graduate studies at the Visual Arts Department of the University of California in San Diego. She left behind her only family, her mother and her son, to create a new future for herself. In the US, Liu embraced her newfound artistic autonomy and explored her own voice, free from any of her former constraints. At UCSD, she studied with experimental American artists such as Alan Kaprow, the father of “happenings,” which were avant-garde performances fusing theatre, dance, visual art, music, and poetry together as illustrations of the imperceptible boundary between life and art. Liu also interacted with other revered artists like Robert Rauschenberg who excited her non-conformist spirit and helped her to discover the liberty to express herself.

After receiving her Master of Fine Arts from UCSD in 1986, Liu went on to teach Chinese art history at the University of Texas. In 1989, while still teaching at UT, she received her first National Endowment for the Arts Painting Fellowship and opened a debut exhibition in New York City in December of that 2

same year. Soon thereafter, in 1990, she left Texas to work in the Art Department of Mills College in Oakland, CA. In addition to teaching, Liu continued to create her own work independently, and she received several notable accolades for her efforts. The M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco held her first major museum exhibition, “Jiu Jin Shan” (Old Gold Mountain), in 1994, and since then Liu has been featured in countless major museum exhibitions around the world. Revered curator Peter Seltz, who transformed the American art scene from his tenure at the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Berkeley Art Center in California, curated a solo exhibition of Liu’s work at American University in Washington, D.C. in 2016. Now, her artworks are included in more than 50 of the world’s top museum collections, and Liu is honored as a Professor Emerita at Mills College, after teaching there for nearly thirty years.

Although Liu became an American citizen in 1991, she in no way relinquished her inherent connection to China. Since moving to the US, she has returned to her home country on multiple occasions to visit family and seek inspiration for her art. From 1984 until 2015, Liu depicted primarily Chinese subjects such as prostitutes, peasants, and laborers whose images she found in discarded archival photographs. As the title hints, one such portrait, “Olympia,” is a nod to the composition and subject matter of Édouard Manet’s 1863 “Olympia”—a landmark painting in the history of Western art. While Manet’s “Olympia” appears independent and unclothed; the woman in Liu’s composition is fully dressed except for her petite, disfigured feet, which are attributable to the ancient Chinese practice of foot binding. By creating the Chinese equivalent to Manet’s “Olympia,” Liu illustrates the vast difference between the plight of women in China versus the West. Works such as “Mother and Child,” “Madame Shoemaker,” “Summer with Cynical Fish,” “Thousand Years of Blessing,” and “Weaver Study” are examples of other paintings Liu created based on photographs she found on her return trips to China. Like Liu, the people featured in these portraits were displaced by either political or natural forces in China and may have never been reunited with their families again. Citing the Chinese belief that a spirit must be called home after death to avoid wandering for eternity, Liu made beautiful “homes” for these uprooted individuals in the afterlife.

Since 2015, Liu has expanded the focus of her work to explore distinctly American themes. One of her few works of non-portraiture, “Dandelion,” depicts a dainty dandelion flower— a metaphor for her own identity in America. The flower drifts, spreading its seeds far and wide to survive and grow virtually anywhere. Like Liu, this tenacious dandelion exhibits a relentless perseverance and a simultaneous delicate beauty to endure no matter the circumstances. Her work, “Sublimation,” epitomizes the visual unification of Liu’s past and present, her Chinese heritage and her cultivated American identity and sense of home. The work places a dandelion alongside a portrait of a Manchu bride. Both forms emerge from the dark, ominous background and into the light. With a head full 3

of feathery seeds, the flower appears on the verge of blowing away. In contrast, the bride sits in a rigid posture, clad in a richly embroidered costume and a lavish floral headdress. Extrapolated from an 1871 photograph taken by Scottish photographer John Thomson, the woman embodies a dramatic loss of freedom; once wedded, Manchu women were held to a strict code of behavior and conduct that regulated their lives. In this poignant work, as in others, Liu juxtaposes the image of the Manchu bride with the dandelion to propose the liberation of women confined by the constraints of their lives and identities in order to make a new home for them.

Several of Liu’s paintings from 2015 onward have been inspired by Dorothea Lange’s Dust Bowl images highlighting American tales of trial and perseverance. Lange served as a Farm Security Administration photographer during the Great Depression as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to combat rural poverty; she captured the realities of American life in the Southern Plains of the US. Based on Lange’s original photographs, Liu’s Dust Bowl portraits voice the power of the childish imagination to persist through hardship and welcome the future with an unequivocal sense of optimism. She zooms in on youthful faces of compassion and benevolence as seen in “Dream Catcher,” “Above the Sky,” and “Little Farmhand II.” In Lange’s photography, Liu has discovered parallel stories of overcoming struggle and transforms these stories into something worthy of triumph, just as she did in her earlier portraits of Chinese concubines, prostitutes, and laborers.

The Grace Museum’s exhibition, “The Long Way Home,” illustrates Liu’s journey of longing to create a sense of home through her art. For Liu, home was never something she took for granted; instead, home was something that she had to generate on her own. Her past in China is central to her establishment of a new place in the US. In Liu’s paintings, she fuses her past and present to give each figure a home, an eternal place where they are not only welcomed but revered, and in doing so, she builds a home for herself.

Hung Liu was named one of the three most influential contemporary artists in the last 100 years by Dorothy Moss, Chief Curator at the National Portrait Gallery, and also has two major retrospective exhibitions: one at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing in the fall of 2019, and the second at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery opening in 2021. Her works are represented by Turner Carroll Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

-Sally Sasz, Morehead-Cain Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

4

DANDELION - YELLOW 1

2018

MIXED MEDIA ON PANEL

12 X 12 IN.

5

6

OLYMPIA

2004

MONOPRINT

35 X 30 IN.

ED. 4

VILLAGE PORTRAIT: THREE LITTLE FISHERMEN

2012

MIXED MEDIA (DUOTONE) ON PANEL

24.5 X 20.5 IN.

ED. 9

7

8

LAST EMPEROR

2009

TAPESTRY

87.5 X 73 IN.

ED. 6

RED WASH EDITION

2014

MIXED MEDIA ON PANEL

20.5 X 20.5 IN

ED. 9

9

10

TIBETAN MAN

2000

OIL ON CANVAS

64 X 48 IN.

MADAME SHOEMAKER

2012

TAPESTRY

55 X 72 IN.

11

12

DA FAN CHE

2017

MIXED MEDIA ON GILDED PANEL

41 X 41 IN.

PRIVATE COLLECTION

MARCH

2012

MIXED MEDIA ON PANEL

20.5 X 20.5 IN.

13

14

GRANDMA I

2012

MIXED MEDIA

4 X 5 IN

ED. 27

WINDMILL IV, STUDY IV

2013

MIXED MEDIA ON PANEL

13.5 X 13.5 IN.

15

16

CARRY ON!

2017

MIXED MEDIA ON PANEL

41 X 41 IN.

DREAM CATCHER

2017

TAPESTRY

75 X 76 IN.

ED. 8

17

18

THE PATH

2011

MIXED MEDIA ON PANEL

41 X 87.5 IN.

19

20

OPEN SKY

2016

MIXED MEDIA ON PANEL

41 X 41 IN.

PRIVATE COLLECTION

THOUSAND YEARS OF BLESSING

2011

MIXED MEDIA ON PANEL

41 X 73 IN.

21

22

WEAVER STUDY

2018

MIXED MEDIA ON PANEL

32 X 41 IN.

SUBLIMATION

2015

PIGMENT PRINT ON MUSEO PAPER

25 X 44 IN.

ED. 9

23

Hung Liu SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA Boise Art Museum, Boise, Idaho Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, IN Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA Jordan D. Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO Library of Congress, Washington, DC Logan Collection, Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA Mills College, Oakland, CA Monterey Museum of Art, Monterey, CA National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA Palm Springs Museum of Art, Palm Springs, CA Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, FL San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, NE Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco - H.M. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, CA The Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China

For a complete artist bio, CV, and all available artworks, please visit our website: turnercarrollgallery.com

Hung Liu’s paintings are included in preeminent museum collections throughout the world. Most recently, 55 mixed media pieces were acquired for the permanent collection of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, to be accompanied by an upcoming book and exhibition. In addition, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art purchased the 35 surviving paintings from “My Secret Freedom,” the watercolor landscape series Liu painted in China during the Cultural Revolution. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art also acquired her self portrait “Avant-Garde” which it featured in the “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World” exhibition organized by the Guggenheim Foundation.

2019-2021 promises two major Hung Liu retrospectives: one at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, curated by Philip Tinari, that opens in December 2019; and the other at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, curated by renowned curator Dorothy Moss, that opens in May 2021.

Little Farmhand II, 2018 mixed media on panel, 41 x 41 in.

Catalogue sponsored by

The Grace Museum 102 Cypress St, Abilene, TX 79601

turnercarrollgallery.com | 725 Canyon Road | Santa Fe, NM 87501 | 505.986.9800