Hung Liu: Gilded Humanism by Turner Carroll Gallery

HUNG LIU GILDED HUMANISM

Turner Carroll Gallery 725 Canyon Road Santa Fe, NM 87501 505.986.9800 turnercarrollgallery.com info@turnercarrollgallery.com ©2022 Turner Carroll Gallery Design: Darcy Spencer and Jeffery Kuiper Essays: Miranda Metcalf, Tonya Turner Carroll, and Michael Carroll

Front Cover: Cotton Carrier, 2019 mixed media on panel 80 x 80" Back Cover: Sisterhood, circa 2016 mixed media on panel 20.5 x 20.5" Above Image: Village Portrait: Broken Bridge, 2013 mixed media, duotone print on panel 13.5 x 10.25", edition variée 4/9

HUNG LIU GILDED HUMANISM After hosting many solo exhibitions for Hung Liu during her lifetime, Turner Carroll Gallery celebrates her legacy as one of the greatest humanist painters of all time. As our exhibition Gilded Humanism runs through the one year anniversary of Liu’s passing, it is an opportunity to look back at what is the complete oeuvre of this indelible artist. Because no new works will ever be produced, we can begin the process of understanding what Hung Liu’s complete legacy means to art history, to world culture at large, and to her many supporters, admirers, and patrons. In many ways Liu was ahead of her time, creating works uplifting marginalized voices decades before the large socio-political dialogs that are currently playing out in the art world. Before racial reckoning, the dramatic re-examination of gender politics, and immigration issues became omni-present around the dinner tables and water coolers of the United States, Liu created deeply empathic portraits of disempowered people from soldiers and sex workers, to immigrants and children. Her multi-disciplinary practice is lauded for its ability to transcend time, race, geography, and to create affinity and human connection. Liu’s sudden death last year was felt deeply throughout the world and The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and Artnet, among many others, featured stories celebrating her life’s work. In 2021 and 2022 her artwork was and is on view coast-to-coast, including at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC where her retrospective Portraits of Promised Lands is the first by an Asian-American woman. Liu’s work was also the subject of a large-scale exhibition, Golden Gate, at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. This year the University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art opened Remember This: Hung Liu at Trillium, an exhibition which features her groundbreaking print, resin, and gold leaf mixed media compositions. Global Asias, a nationally touring museum exhibition organized by the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, features Liu’s prints, oils, and mixed media works and will be working its way across the United States from the Palmer Museum in Pennsylvania to the Knoxville Museum of Art in Tennessee, and to the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York. Additionally, Liu was honored with a lifetime achievement award for her career as a printmaker by the Southern Graphics Council in 2011. This year the Albuquerque Museum’s Printer’s Proof exhibition highlights some of Liu’s most remarkable print works, and the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation has purchased Liu’s entire print archive, ensuring the safety and legacy of this aspect of her practice. Gilded Humanism at Turner Carroll will highlight Hung Liu’s stunning resins and will be a continuation of a museum exhibition which toured through Texas curated by Tonya Turner Carroll. Often featuring brilliant gold leaf backgrounds, these works are some of the most striking in the diverse artistic language of Liu. Some of these works have never before been exhibited at Turner Carroll Gallery, and all speak to her remarkable legacy as an artist, humanist, activist, and friend. 1

The Path, 2011 mixed media on panel 41 x 87.5", triptych

Equus III, 2014 mixed media on panel 60 x 60"

Ma I, 2014 mixed media on panel 41 x 41"

His Tibet, 2012 mixed media on panel 41 x 41"

White Rice Bowl Study II, 2014 mixed media on panel 20.5 x 20.5"

Mission Girls Series 04-03, 2013 mixed media on panel 13.5 x 13.5"

Nüwa’s Creation, 2020 mixed media on panel 50 x 25.5"

Mission Girls Series, 2013 mixed media on panel 13.5 x 13.5"

Manchu Bride, Gold, 2015 mixed media on panel 20.5 x 20.5", edition variée 4/4

Mission Girls Series (I) 08-01, 2013 mixed media on panel 13.5 x 13.5"

Transformation, 2020 mixed media on panel 50 x 50"

Mission Girls Series (I) 07-02, 2013 mixed media on panel 13.5 x 13.5"

Da Fan Che, 2008 mixed media on panel 30 x 30"

Fallen Flowers II, 2013 mixed media on panel 13.5 x 10.5"

Da Fan Che with Fish and Circle, 2012 mixed media on panel 20 x 20"

Autumn Wind, 2016 mixed media on panel 41 x 78", triptych

Falconer IV, 2017 mixed media on panel 60 x 41"

Old City, 2012 mixed media on panel 25 x 40"

The End, 2012 mixed media on panel 41 x 41"

Remote Portrait VI, 2015 mixed media on panel 20.5 x 20.5", edition variée 1/4

Blue Angel, 2019 mixed media on panel 36 x 36"

Calendar Girls Series Ochre, 2009 mixed media on panel 13.5 x 13.5"

The Unknown IV Study, 2016 mixed media on panel 20.5 x 41"

HUNG LIU’S DUSTBOWL SERIES INSPIRED BY DOROTHEA LANGE 2015 marked a turning point in Hung Liu’s career. She spent almost half her life in the U.S. by then; 24 years as an American citizen. For Liu, the lure of American subject matter materialized with Dorothea Lange’s Dust Bowl era Farm Security Administration photographs of American migrant workers. Like Liu had done with her own photographs of Chinese peasants in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, Lange captured the dignity of these dispossessed American souls in her photographs. In Lange’s photographs, Liu saw herself. She realized that she was the farmer leaving her homeplace to find a better life; she was the child with tattered clothes not knowing what the future would bring. It was as if she lived a parallel existence to American migrants on the other side of the world. Liu began painting works inspired by Lange’s photography. When asked why she felt she could authentically paint people whose lives she had not herself lived, she insisted that “if we can adopt each other’s children, we should be able to adopt each other’s ancestors, as well.”

Cotton Carrier, 2019 mixed media on panel 80 x 80"

Migrant Child with Cat, 2018 mixed media on panel 60 x 60"

South - Gold, 2018 mixed media on panel 60 x 60"

Lavender, 2020 mixed media on panel 48 x 48"

Cottonfield, 2017 mixed media on panel 50 x 70"

Reader, 2018 mixed media on panel 60 x 60"

The Seasons, 2021 mixed media on panel 41 x 41"

Cotton Hoer Study, 2018 mixed media on panel 20.5 x 20.5"

Little Farmhand III, 2018 mixed media on panel 41 x 41"

Hung Liu at The San Jose Museum of Art Wonderball, 2017

ABOUT HUNG LIU Born in Changchun, China, in 1948, Hung Liu was forced to seek sanctuary very early in life. Her father, an officer in General Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalist army, was sent to a labor camp by the newly triumphant Maoist regime when Liu was an infant. To escape governmental retaliation, her mother was forced to divorce Liu’s father, burn his photographs, and flee Changchun for Beijing during Mao’s Great Leap Forward which ran from 1959 –1961. On their journey, Liu witnessed famine and desperation. She saw a baby abandoned on the river bank by its mother—a poignant image that remains in her mind. She knew that the baby could have easily been herself, had her own mother not sacrificed much of her own life to keep Liu alive. This concept of sanctuary not just as a physical location, but in another person’s heart and memory grew in Liu from a very young age. When Liu witnessed her peers in the Red Guard beat and kill her high school principal, her mother and her art were her sanctuary. By the time she reached twenty in 1968, Liu was subjected to four years of labor in the Chinese countryside as part of the Chinese government’s Cultural Revolution “re-education” program aimed at re-radicalizing young people, and suppressing the intellectual class. Liu often mentions a book she clung to during her four years of toil: Romain Rolland’s Jean Christophe. In the novel a man carries an infant across the river, even as the water continues to engulf him. Symbolizing the dawn of a new day, Rolland’s analogy gave Liu the philosophical sanctuary she needed to believe there could be a better tomorrow. This experience helped her realize the transformative power of art, and that—as an artist—she could provide that same hope for others. During these difficult years toiling in the countryside, Liu also found sanctuary in photographing the people she met in villages in the countryside, and in painting small watercolors every day using a paint box she hid under her bed, and a secret camera given to her by a friend. Her “Secret Freedom” landscape paintings now reside in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the faces of unnamed common people she met in rural Chinese villages appear in many of Liu’s photographs and paintings in this catalog, as well appeared in her recent National Portrait Gallery retrospective. Possibly because her own family photographs were destroyed, Liu came to realize that preserving someone’s image in art is a gift of sanctuary she could offer. When Liu returned to Beijing to complete her formal artistic education at The Central Academy of Art, she was trained in Socialist Realism, and studied mural painting. Rather than using her artwork to glorify the Maoist regime, she chose to paint humble humans, animals, and poetic cave paintings from another time. When David Hockney visited Liu’s school, he was impressed by her humanist iconography, and remarked about Liu’s artistic bravery in his 1982 book China Diary, even including a photograph of Hung Liu in his book. After graduating, Liu petitioned the Chinese government for a hard-to-get passport so that she could travel to California and study with experimental artists like Allan Kaprow at UC San Diego.

In 1984, Liu finally received her passport and entered graduate school at UC San Diego. She left behind her only family—her mother and her six-year-old son, and she found sanctuary not only in the United States, but also in the whole new experience of contemporary art. Her artistic teachers and colleagues at UCSD included Moira Roth, Carrie Mae Weems, and her husband of 35 years, Jeff Kelley. Liu dove into the international art world head first, interacting with the top contemporary artists in the world. She often recounted the time she met Robert Rauschenberg at the Venice Biennale shortly after graduate school. When she met him, he signed her Chinese passport. Rauschenberg proclaimed that she now had a passport not only to the U.S., but also to the art world. Liu taught at Mills College for more than two decades, and she became a lifelong, beloved mentor for her students. She received accolades like the NEA Painting Fellowships, Joan Mitchell Foundation Awards, trusteeships at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and San Jose Museum of Art, and in 2021, she was the first-ever Asian-American, woman artist to have a retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery. Smithsonian curator Dorothy Moss declares Liu “one of the most influential artists of the last 100 years.” Liu has had countless museum exhibitions and her works are now included in the permanent collections of more than 50 of the world’s most prestigious museums. From the time Liu arrived in the U.S. in 1984 and continuing through 2015, she expressed her art through Chinese subject matter. She gave Chinese prostitutes, workers, and the peasants she knew from her time in the countryside sanctuary in her paintings. She transformed painful realities like the Chinese practice of foot binding, mothers not having enough milk to feed their babies, or having to pull a plow with one’s own body, into beautiful examples of human resilience. In doing so, Hung Liu allows us to see ourselves in the struggles of others who often look and live differently from ourselves.

Candle V, 2019 mixed media on panel 20.5 x 16"

SELECTED COLLECTIONS Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, AZ Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA AT&T Corporation, New York, NY Baruch College, William & Anita Newman Library, CUNY, New York, NY Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY City & County of San Francisco, Moscone Convention Center, San Francisco, CA City of San Jose, San Jose, CA Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, IN The Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO Library of Congress, Washington, DC Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, CA Mills College, Oakland, CA Muscarelle Museum of Art, College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC State of New Mexico, NM Arts in Public Places, Santa Fe, NM Oakland International Airport, Port of Oakland, CA Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA Palmer Museum of Art, Lakeland, FL Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, FL Rutgers Archives, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, NJ San Francisco Federal Building, San Francisco, CA 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 St. Paul Companies, St. Paul, MN United States Federal Building, San Francisco, CA University of Arizona, Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN 39 Washington Convention Center, Washington, DC The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

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