In 1968, under Mao Tse-Tung's sweeping "Down to the Countryside Movement," twenty-year-old Hung Liu was resettled in rural China for proletariat reeducation. Far from the urban comforts of Beijing, she labored in the fields, toiling alongside other "sent-down youth" for the creation of a Communist utopia. Upon her return to the capital in 1972, she enrolled in university as an art student - but chafing under the state's exclusive demands for propaganda, she escaped each day to Beijing's desolate outskirts. There, in peace, she painted the landscapes of her self-named "Secret Freedom" series, delighting in these humble studies of color, composition, and form. But her modest subjects, such as a toilet rather than a rosy-cheeked Mao, incited questions from her roommate: Did they "sing great songs for the Party"? Why was she painting them? What was her political status? Liu ignored this surveillance and made more than five hundred works, keeping faith, year after year, in the joy and fierce necessity of free expression. 

Nancy Lim

Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture

SFMOMA

My Secret Freedom #25, oil on canvas, 1972-75

My Secret Freedom #15, oil on canvas, 1972-75

My Secret Freedom #14, oil on canvas, 1972-75

My Secret Freedom #13, oil on canvas, 1972-75

My Secret Freedom #10, oil on canvas, 1972-75

 

My Secret Freedom #22,  gauche  on paper, 1972-75

 

My Secret Freedom #29, & #32, oil on canvas, 1972-75

SFMOMA installation, 2nd floor

With Gary Garrels, Nancy Lim, & Walter Maciel

Who it's for ...

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Hung Liu in Print

National Museum of Women in the Arts

Washington, DC

January 19  - July 8, 2018

"Hung Liu In Print" invites viewers to explore the relationship between the artist's multi-layered paintings and the palpable, physical qualities of her works on paper. To make her prints, Liu uses an array of printing and collage techniques, developing highly textured surfaces, veils of color, and screens of drip marks that transform the figures in each composition. Describing printmaking as "poetry," she emphasizes the spontaneity of the layering process, which allows each image to build organically with each successive layer.  Best known as a painter, Liu ably translates the "weeping realism" that characterizes her canvases into the medium of prints. This focus exhibition highlights selected prints from the collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts as well as the artist's related tapestry designs.

"Hung Liu In Print", presented in the Teresa Lozano Long Gallery of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, is organized by the museum and generously supported by its members.

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Hung Liu: All Over the Map

Sanchez Art Center

Pacifica, CA

February 23 - March 25, 2018

Curated by Phil Linhares

For years artist Jerry Barrish, the volunteer director of the Sanchez Art Center in Pacifica, had been inviting Hung to show there. Finally, an idea emerged that would not conflict with her many other obligations, and that was to gather and exhibit an array of mixed-media resin pieces, made at Trillium Graphics, and exhibit them separately from Hung's oil paintings. Invented as a technique for Hung by Master Printer David Salgado, making such work involves, to quote Leah Garchik, combining "fragments of paintings with photos and historical materials, and [embedding] them in layers of translucent material (resin), on top of which she paints." Liu and Salgado call them "Bastard Paintings," or Za Zhong, since they are the illegitimate and unwanted bastard children of an affair between painting and printmaking. The show, the audience, and the warm feeling were worth the multi-year wait. (Thanks Jerry!)

 

    

 Jerry Barrish, Hung, David Salgado

With Jim Edwards (who gave Hung one of her first shows in San Antonio, Texas) & Phil Linhares

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In(di)visible

Station Museum of Contemporary Art

Houston, TX

February 3 - April 22, 2018

In(di)visible is an exhibition examining immigration, the residual effects of war, and the implications of assimilation, integration, and invisibility for Asian Americans. Reinforced through systematic subjugation and discrimination, the myth of the 'model minority' obscures the lived experiences of people perceived as Asian in America and is often used as a wedge between them and other marginalized groups. A pervasive disconnect exists between Hollywood depictions of Asian people in America and the breadth and variety of the people inhabiting those realities. The artists in this exhibition (besides Hung, Mel Chin, Pay Houa Her, Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung, Miao Jiaxin, Laurel Nakadate, Zeus Paredes, Judy Shintani, Lien Troung, Dan S. Wang, Hong-An Truong, and Huong Ngo) use their experiences to bring visibility and add nuance to the cultural understanding of Asians in America.

Branches: The Wong Family Portraits, 1988, charcoal & oil on canvas, three panels, fortune cookies

Mel Chin, poster for film production of "Wilder West," 2018

Mel Chin & Hung Liu

With Lien Troung, artist and Mills College Alumna

With Jeff's college roommate and virtuoso violist James Dunham, Professor at Rice University

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Hung Liu: Transformation

The exhibition Hung Liu: Transformation is the first major Colorado exhibition of the artwork of Hung Liu - one of the most prominent Chinese painters working in the United States today. Featuring 15 large-scale paintings, as well as a rarely seen, room-size installation, the exhibition celebrates the persistent theme in Hung Liu's artwork of movement and migration, at both literal and metaphoric levels. This body of work emphasizes a symbiotic, fluid relationship with the past and a deeply poignant understanding of the persistence of time. The exhibition explores the evolution of Liu's artistic practice and investigates the complex interactions between individual memory and history. Included in the exhibition are two recent paintings from a 2016 series that were the result of Liu's long affiliation with and affection for the photographs of Dorothea Lange and other WPA photograp

Shifting focus from Chinese to American subjects may seem a surprise to Liu's audience, at first. But by training her attention on the displaced individuals and wandering families of the American Dustbowl, Liu finds a landscape of overarching struggle and underlying humanity that for her is familiar terrain, having been raised in China during an era (Mao's) of epic revolution, tumult, and displacement. The 1930s Oakies and Bindle-stiff's wandering like ghosts through Liu's new paintings are American peasants on their way to California, the promised land.

In her paintings for Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art and Byron Cohen, Liu - who is known for a fluid style in which drips and washes of linseed oil dissolve the photo-bas ed images the way time erodes memory - has developed a kind of topographic realism in which the paint coagulates around a webbing of colored lines, together enmeshed in a rich surface - like Chinese cloisonné, that belies the poverty of h er subjects. In this, the new paintings are more factually woven to Lange's photographs while also releasing the energy of color like a radiant of hope from beneath the grey-tones of history.

The paradoxical result has been a softening of the ground and a hardening - a kind of mapping - of the figures, whose edges and outlines and details are sharpened by the colorful lines and squiggles that both stiffen and liberate them. In short, looking hard at Lange's photographs has changed Liu's painting, allowing her empathic sense of touch, and her deeply intuitive knowledge of color as a liberating force, to make contact with the stories underlying their surfaces - stories which, whether Chinese or American, continue emerging like hope for all who still seek a place in history.

With Sherry Leedy of Sherry Leedy Gallery, Kansas City

Art History, Theory, Criticism

Department of Visual Arts

University of California, San Diego

At the University Art Gallery, UCSD, 2017

Five Star Red Flag, 1995, oil on canvas, diptych

German Sheppard, oil on canvas, 1998

With Professor Sheldon Nodleman at UCSD