Huai Rou, China. April, 1972
Her hands were blistered and her face was splotched with mud after
12 straight hours of hoeing corn on a communal farm at the height
of China’s “Cultural Revolution.”
It was a blustery spring afternoon in 1972, and Hung Liu was feeling
excited, almost joyful, in spite of her physical discomfort. The
feisty and independent-minded 24-year-old from Manchuria had spent
the past four years undergoing “compulsory reeducation” at
the communal farm about 50 miles from Beijing, but today she had
managed to hide a contraband pencil stub in the back pocket of
her muddy jacket. Liu had a pencil, and she was about to begin drawing a black-and-white
portrait of a village elder named Mr. Wu.
An old man enjoys a hand-rolled cigarette at twilight. Mr. Wu’s
craggy face was lined with age; his bent spine twisted by 70 years
of working the stony fields. “He was just another old man
nearing the end of his days in an obscure Chinese village,” Liu
recalls.
Each evening at dusk, after their 12 hours of raking and hoeing
came to an end, the farm workers from the collective would gather
to talk and smoke and drink endless cups of tea. And the old man
would sit alone at one of the wooden tables that flanked the communal
tool shed. Moving slowly, hands trembling, he would light his cheap
cigarette, and the pale blue smoke would drift past his squinting
eyes.
Could she capture that timeless gaze on the scrap of paper she’d
cut from a bag, earlier that day?
Yes! Now she sat at one end of the table, her eyes locked on his
ancient face, while her hand raced over the paper. The pencil stub
flashed, and the lines came swiftly together. “He was at
the end of his life, and who would remember him?” Liu asks,
more than three decades later. “He was like my grandmother,
an old woman who’d spent her entire life working and struggling
in obscurity. She lived, she died, then was gone forever. Who would
remember that she had ever walked the earth?”
When Liu gave Mr. Wu the pencil-portrait, he stared at it for a
while, then looked up and smiled. She did not forget that smile,
it allowed her to dream again. Someday she would be able to make
larger paintings, huge paintings of wonderful subjects like Mr.
Wu.
That afternoon in rural China took place more than 34 years ago.
Today, after 20 years of artistic struggle in America, Hung Liu
is one of this country’s most highly regarded and influential
painters. “I want people to see the human suffering all around
us,” she says. “The war, the famine, the struggle against
disease and poverty. To grow old, and to lose your loved ones.
The common tragedies we all share . . . I want to put those tragedies
on the canvas, huge and burning, coming more alive with every stroke
of my brush!”
Painting Trash At UCSD
On October 26, 1984, Liu boarded a China Air 747
and took off for a brand-new life in the United States. She was
36 years old, and
she carried her life savings in her pocketbook— exactly $20.
But she was also in possession of a letter that promised her a
full scholarship at UCSD, where she’d been admitted as a
master’s degree candidate by the Fine Arts Department.
Behind her lay four years of backbreaking labor at the Huai Rou “proletarian
education farm,” one of the thousands of forced-labor settlements
that had been operated by Mao Zedong at the height of China’s
1966-76 Cultural Revolution.
The daughter of a former captain in Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist
Army, the Kuomintang—ultimately defeated by Mao in the Chinese
Civil War of 1945-1949—the Manchuria-born Liu had survived
years of famine and chaotic violence before moving to Beijing at
age 11 and becoming a top student and prizewinning high school
graduate.
 Arrested by the Red Guards because of her brilliant academic
record at an experimental school for gifted students, Liu completed
a
four-year reeducation at the farm, then earned a degree in art
education at Beijing Teachers’ College. By 1979, she was
enrolled in Beijing’s famed Central Academy of Fine Arts,
where the students were drilled relentlessly in the basics of drawing
and painting—“Copy, copy, copy!”—then taught
the Soviet-inspired style of Socialist Realism so they could become
effective propagandists for the working class.
Liu survived it all, and then spent three years struggling to win
a coveted passport that would allow her to study art in the West.
Accepted at UCSD in 1981, she was refused the passport again and
again. But each semester, the Visual Arts department renewed its
offer of a scholarship. Then suddenly in 1984, she found herself
climbing aboard a jumbo jet to California.
“I had never been in an airplane before, can you believe it? I was
also struggling with the pain of saying goodbye to China—the
world that had shaped me, and the only world I’d ever known,” Liu
told @UCSD magazine during a recent interview.
She arrived in California with two huge suitcases, $20 in her
pocket and no other money. “It was all very strange, very new for
me,” she says.
Once settled on campus, she had to borrow the money
to pay her first month’s rent, even as she struggled to assimilate
Western ideas about the meaning of art. One of her first instructors
was
the legendary Allan Kaprow—a revolutionary figure (and
the inventor of the 1960s-era performance art form known as a “Happening”).
He quickly challenged the tightly wound social realist to loosen
up and have some fun on the canvas.
“I signed up for his art seminar,” she recalls, “and
one of the first things he did was to put several students in his
truck and take us to a big trash dumpster near the campus. And
he told us: ‘Today we are going to paint the trash!’
“I was completely lost! I had been trained so carefully at the Central
Academy in Beijing, and I had been taught to take everything
so seriously. I said, ‘What is this? Allan wants me to
paint trash from the dumpster?’
“But I grabbed a board from the dumpster, and I began to splash
paint on it. And all at once, I saw that art could be playful.
Allan had liberated me from the ‘burden of expectation’ as
an artist. For me, it was the beginning of a whole new way of seeing
art. It was East meets West!”
When Allan Kaprow died at age 78 last April 5 (see
obituary page 47), Liu flew down from Oakland—where she has
been teaching art since 1990 at Mills College—to pay her
respects to the legendary artist who had been her mentor.
“It was a wonderful event,” she said of the three-hour memorial
service. “His friends read poems and sang songs and commented
on his amazing career as an artist, and on his kindness as a friend.
I was glad to be there, as a way of saying thanks—because
Allan changed my artistic work, and he changed my life.”
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