Hung Liu: The Long Way Home

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Catalogue sponsored by

Turner Carroll Gallery 725 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501 505.986.9800 turnercarrollgallery.com info@turnercarrollgallery.com Š2020 Turner Carroll Gallery Essay: Sally Sasz Design: Sally Sasz Photography: courtesy of the artist Front Cover: Spring Chick, 2011 mixed media on panel 41 x 41 in.

Back Cover: (Untitled) Mother and Child, 2016 mixed media on panel 41 x 41 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 growing up in China under Mao Zedong’s communist regime. Born in Changchun in 1948, Liu was forced to migrate from place to place throughout her youth due to famine, government mandates, and overwhelming desperation. While Mao’s regime undermined Liu’s notion of home in her youth, this strife inspired her to develop a home away from home through her artistic practice. Since moving to the United States in 1984, Liu has dedicated her life as an artist to providing herself, her subjects, and the viewer with a place to call home in her paintings.

During her childhood, the Chinese government threatened Liu’s family, freedom, and art.

Her father was imprisoned when she was an infant for resisting government orders. This drove her mother to destroy all their family photographs to avoid further retaliation. At the age of eleven, Liu and her mother fled to Beijing, where they barely survived 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. For four years, she labored tirelessly for 364 days a year. Liu’s Grandma I highlights an elderly individual in the countryside village where she was bound to work. Backed with gold leaf, this duotone image memorializes the resiliency of the human spirit, a theme that she continued to explore throughout her art.

Liu began her formal artistic education at The Central Academy of Art in Beijing. There, she trained in Socialist Realism— an idealized, propaganda-infused style promoted by the Mao regime. During this time in China, Liu’s art was restricted by many style and subject limitations deemed inappropriate by the government. Still, she rebelled against these confines through loose washes of color and liberal drips of paint. In 1984, Liu emigrated to the US to pursue her graduate studies at the Visual Arts Department of the University of California in San Diego. She left behind her her mother and son to create a new future for herself. As Liu embraced her newfound autonomy in the US, she broadened her artistic palette. At UCSD, she studied with experimental American artists such as Alan Kaprow, the father of “happenings,” avant-garde performances challenging the boundary between life and art. Liu also interacted with other revered artists like Robert Rauschenberg who excited her non-conformist spirit.

After receiving her Master of Fine Arts from UCSD in 1986, Liu went on to teach Chinese art history at the University of Texas at Arlington. In 1989, then working as an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of North Texas, she received her first National Endowment for the 2

Arts Painting Fellowship and opened a debut exhibition in New York City in December of that same year. Soon thereafter, in 1990, she left Texas to work in the Art Department of Mills College in Oakland, CA. In conjunction with teaching, Liu continued creating her own work independently, receiving 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 of MoMA and the Berkeley Arts Center, Peter Seltz, 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.

Liu became an American citizen in 1991, but she never relinquished her inherent connection to China. On the contrary, Liu has returned to her home-country on multiple occasions to visit family and seek inspiration for her art. From 1984—the year she moved to the US—until 2015, Liu’s paintings depicted primarily Chinese subjects such as prostitutes, peasants, and laborers whose images originated from discarded archival photographs Liu found during her return trips to China. Mother and Child, Madame Shoemaker, and Thousand Years of Blessing are examples of such works. Like Liu, the individuals featured in these portraits were displaced by either political or natural forces 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 her art.

Since 2015, however, Liu has expanded the focus of her work to explore distinctly American themes. Several of Liu’s paintings from 2015 onward have been inspired by Dorothea Lange’s Dust Bowl photographs. Lange served as a Farm Security Administration photographer during the Great Depression and captured realities of American life in the Southern Plains of the US; the initiative coincided with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to combat rural poverty. Based on Lange’s original photographs, Liu zooms in on youthful faces of compassion and benevolence. As seen in Dream Catcher and Little Farmhand II, Liu’s Dust Bowl portraits illuminate the power of the youthful imagination to persist through hardship and embrace the future. Most of all, Liu discovered parallel stories of struggle and perseverance in Lange’s photographs similar to those illustrated in her earlier portraits of Chinese prostitutes and laborers. Similarly, she transforms these narratives into stories of triumph, to be celebrated and glorified.

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One of her few works of non-portraiture, Dandelion, depicts a dainty dandelion flower.

This flower serves as metaphor for Liu’s own identity in the US. By nature, the dandelion flower drifts, spreading its seeds far and wide to survive and grow virtually anywhere.

Like Liu, the dandelion exhibits a delicate beauty coupled with a unabashed tenacity.

Sublimation epitomizes the visual reconciliation of Liu’s past and present, her Chinese heritage and her cultivated American identity. The work places a dandelion alongside a portrait of a Manchu bride—both forms emerge from the ominous background and into the light. With a head full of feathery seeds, the flower appears on the verge of blowing away. In contrast, the bride sits rigidly, clad in a richly embroidered costume and a lavish floral headdress. She appears visibly governed by the strict codes which regulated the lives of young brides in China in the late nineteenth century. Extrapolated from an 1871 photograph taken by Scottish photographer John Thomson, the Manchu bride exemplifies a dramatic loss of freedom. Liu juxtaposes the image of the Manchu bride with the dandelion to suggest the symbolic liberation of such women from the constraints of their lives and cultural identities through her paintings.

This exhibition, “The Long Way Home,” originates from Turner Carroll Gallery in Santa Fe, NM, and previously travelled to The Grace Museum in Abilene, TX, before coming to the Amarillo Museum of Art. Celebrating often overlooked stories of struggle and perseverance, the exhibition illustrates Liu’s life-long journey to create a home for herself and others through her art.

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

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DANDELION - YELLOW 1

2018

MIXED MEDIA ON PANEL

12 X 12 IN.

5

6

OLYMPIA

2004

MONOPRINT

35 X 30 IN.

ED. 4

LITTLE FARMHAND II

2018

MIXED MEDIA ON PANEL

41 X 41 IN.

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

BLESSED II

2008

MIXED MEDIA ON GILDED PANEL

41 X 41 IN.

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

HER MOUNTAIN II

2010

MIXED MEDIA ON PANEL

48 X 48 IN.

THOUSAND YEARS OF BLESSING

2011

MIXED MEDIA ON PANEL

41 X 73 IN.

21

22

SUBLIMATION

2015

PIGMENT PRINT ON MUSEO PAPER

25 X 44 IN.

ED. 9

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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 or contact info@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.

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. Though her fall 2019 retrospective at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing was cancelled due to Chinese government censorship, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery is set to hold a solo retrospective for Liu opening in 2021 curated by Moss herself. Liu’s works are represented by Turner Carroll Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Catalogue sponsored by

Amarillo Museum of Art 2200 S Van Buren St, Amarillo, TX 79109

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