Hung Liu: American Dream at Turner Carroll Gallery

HUNG LIU: AMERICAN DREAM

Hung Liu is undoubtedly one of the most revered contemporary painters in the U.S. as well as in China, with works included in top museum collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and many others. It is with enormous excitement that Turner Carroll presents to you Hung’s newest paintings in which she focuses on the struggle, perseverance, and ultimate transcendence of Depression-Era America. I believe these paintings are among the most artistically significant Hung Liu has created in her career.

Liu was born in China to a captain in Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army; her father was captured by Communist forces and imprisoned in a labor camp. Hung and her mother fled to Beijing, where they survived Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward and the mass famine it induced.

Hung’s mother destroyed all family photos which included Hung’s father in order to protect Hung from the Mao regime, which viewed Nationalists and their families as enemies of the people. Hung thus came to treasure family photographs, whether they depicted her own family or someone else’s.

Hung was sent to the countryside for proletarian “re-education” at age 20, and worked in rice and wheat fields among China’s downtrodden, 364 days/year, for four long years. A friend asked Hung to safeguard her camera during that time, and Hung took secret photographs of the Chinese people alongside whom she toiled. These photographs became her collective family album; they are the basis for her iconic portraits in which she has memorialized these workers’ humanity for the last thirty years of her painting practice.

In recent years, Hung Liu became fascinated with American Depression-Era photographs. It’s not surprising Liu feels an affinity for the migrants, women, and children whom Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers like Dorothea Lange captured so intimately. Like the Americans in the photographs, Hung was a laborer who left family members behind and migrated to find a better life. Hung is, herself, like the proud mother in Lange’s “Breast Milk,” and she is also a determined child in “American Dream” and “South.”

Liu has found kindred, artistic visionaries in Dorothea Lange and other Depression-era photographers. Just as Hung has always given the downtrodden new lives of beauty in her paintings, these American photographers canonize the dignity of human perseverance in their photographs. As David M. Roth writes of Liu’s current body of American Depression-Era paintings, “These are respectful tributes, not re-interpretations…Liu… consistently wrings transcendence from austerity.” Part of the transcendent aspect of these paintings lies in the way Liu electrifies the figures with multi-colored outlines. Hung describes these bright outlines as “hope, coming from the cracks between things”—almost like a halo of the human spirit.

When recently asked by a museum group why she chose to paint American, rather than Chinese subjects, Hung responded “we can adopt each other’s children, so why can’t we adopt each other’s ancestors?” This one statement, for me, sums up the true essence and quintessential importance of Hung Liu’s work. She paints the shared struggle of humanity, and transforms that struggle into the most sublime beauty.

Tonya Turner Carroll

June 2017

Breast Milk,2015 single-color lithograph with monotyping 22 x 20 in.

Breast Milk, 2016 Oil on Canvas 80 x 80 in.

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Former Slave, 2016 Oil on Canvas 48 x 48 in.

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American Dream, 2016 Oil on Canvas 72 x 60 in.

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South, 2016 Oil on Canvas 60 x 48 in.

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Mexican Child, 2016 Oil on Canvas 36 x 36 in.

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Dirty Pink, 2016 Oil on Canvas 80 x 120 in.

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Cotton Field, 2017 Oil on Canvas 48 x 48 in.

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Lady Cotton, 2017 Mixed Media on Panel 82 x 82 in.

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Laborer: Filipino Field Hand, 2016 Oil on Canvas 36 x 36 in.

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Route 66, 2016 Six Plate Color Lithograph 25.25 x 31.5 in.

Route 66 with Cat, 2016 Six Plate Color Lithograph 25.25 x 31.5 in.

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SELECTED MUSEUM COLLECTIONS Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, Arizona Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, California Baruch College, William & Anita Newman Library, City University of New York, New York Boise Art Museum, Boise, Idaho Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, Indiana Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee Iris & B. Gerald Canton Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California Jordan D. Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri Los Angeles County Museum, Los Angeles, California Mills College, Oakland, California Monterey Museum of Art, Monterey, California Muscarelle Museum of Art, College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. Logan collection, Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, California Palm Springs Museum of Art, Palm Springs, California Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, Florida Rutgers Archives for Printmaking Studios at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, New Jersey San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, California Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California Santa Clara University, de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara, California Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts Spencer Mueum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco - H.M. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, California The Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York

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Dandelion with Dragonflies monotype with hand leafing and hand coloring 31 x 32 in.

Dandelion with Cicada monotype with hand leafing and hand coloring 31 x 32 in.

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