hung liu - artist's statement:i paint from historical photographs, usually those taken of chinese subjects by foreigners. these have included 19th century images of chinese female “types,” prostitutes, child street acrobats, war refugees, and women laboring at such tasks as pulling a boat upriver, operating an industrial-scale loom, and walking in circles (like mules) behind the handle of a millstone grinder.
as a painter, i am interested in subjecting the documentary authority of historical photographs to the more reflective process of painting; i want to both preserve and destroy the image. much of the meaning of my painting comes from the way the washes and drips dissolve the photo-based images, opening them to a slower kind of looking, suggesting perhaps the cultural and personal narratives fixed in the photographic instant.
i also introduce traditional chinese painting motifs into the photo-based field, hoping to enliven and stir up its surface. these include images of birds, flowers, stamps, and landscapes, among others, all borrowed from chinese art history and suspended in the paintings. the traditional motifs evoke a sense of the cultural memory underlying the surfaces of history. in particular, the stylized chinese birds - some from paintings as old as one thousand years - seem like witnesses from china’s past, overlooking and commenting upon events from its modern era. thus, two layers of historical representation – from traditional painting and modern photography – co-exist in my paintings. the result of this overlay is a liberation of the rigid methodology of socialist realism – the style in which I was trained in china – as an improvisational painting style in which the photo-realism used in the service of propaganda dissolves into a fresh kind of history painting. In other words, i convert socialist realism into social realism.
curator statement: Tthe memories of both words and images together constitute the memories of every human being. for many years hung liu’s efforts have been to look for the traces of memories from paintings over the last thousand years, from photos of chinese people taken by foreigners, and from the pictures of china taken since 1949. however, why do so many people suddenly generate such a great interest in visual art?
on the one hand, unlimited cultural and historical treasures are hidden in the ancient time stream of visual images. chinese people can point to the original sources in philology, literature, philosophy, art, music, traditional gardens/landscaping, and so forth. the pleasure of coming across these visual images has helped form special chinese-style paintings. on the other hand, advanced modern science and technology ensure artists use visible techniques and invisible imagination to reveal a totally new meaning for visual images in the current cultural environment. though living in the u.s., hung liu possesses the original inspiration and image sources from her vivid memory of a certain period she experienced in china, from 1948 to 1984, which still shapes her imaginative world.
for example, the suffering reflected in her red river, painted in 1998, about the bitter life of chinese laborers, is not unique to china, but commonly exists around the world. moreover, today what is happening to the "red river" is also happening to the "blue river", and the rivers of other colors. the painting king’s sky, queen’s land borrows from a painting drawn by an emperor of the song dynasty as background to display an extensive landscape, where a camel, a human figure, and flowers and birds are composed together on the canvas to visualize an inexplicably fictitious reality constituted by the combination of images and memory, history and culture, the king’s sky and the queen’s land. The painting cliche: peasant family, set against a bright sun-rise, is a group photo of three members from an ordinary chinese family, which is overlapped with images of scholar's rocks and flowers. their look of dull anxiety reveals the kindness of average chinese people, especially of the peasants, whose faces represent china’s face, since china is a large agricultural country. another revelation is the utterly helpless condition chinese peasants are now facing. through this painting, we are actually looking at our profound inner side. the painting leap depicts three blossoming boys jumping into a river; in the distance, a painted circle is like a shadowy moon luring their leap.
the scene in one thousand miles seems absurd. two strong men bind a swift horse’s legs. then comes the question "once a horse’s legs are bound, how can we expect it to run ground of a moon one thousand miles, even if it is a swift horse?" to reach one thousand miles, either it must imagine galloping in its mind; or, tear away from the bindings and gallop a thousand miles. are human's not the same? In parachute, a dreamy parachute suddenly appears on the left side above an old peasant eating from a bowl, which appears to be a metaphor of the reality of the collision and contradiction between contemporary technology and agriculture. today, as modernization progresses on the ground of hhina day and night, a promising age begins! How will we face our spirituality with material wealth falling from the sky? it’s a question put forward by hung liu.
when surveying hung liu’s paintings over the past few years, it’s apparent that she continues to carry on a love affair with chinese history. she uses her paintbrush to criticize the realities of china, to expose the contradictions within chinese society as well as the collisions within the individual human heart.
thus, although she lives outside her homeland, hung liu's heart remains at the great wall - heavy, anguished, yet passionate. no matter whether her memory of visual images is an addition to or a subtraction from reality, she still gathers all her passion at the end of a paintbrush to create a thoroughly vivid description of her personal understanding of reality in china that touches and compels every spectator.
Zhang Qing
Director of Shanghai Biennale Office
Curator of 2004 Shanghai Biennale
Altogether, I hope to wash my subjects of their exotic “otherness” and reveal them as dignified, even mythic figures on the grander scale of history painting. I am looking for the mythic pose beneath the historical figure - and the painting beneath the photograph.
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