Saving and Destroying the Past
But Kaprow’s “liberation” wasn’t the only
gift Liu received in La Jolla; she also met the art critic Jeff
Kelley, M.F.A.’85. During 20 years of marriage, they have
worked together as an artistic duo, with Kelley publishing books
and articles on contemporary art and Liu building a national reputation
as one of the country’s most productive painters and printmakers.
“I think what’s really unique about Hung’s work is the
way she turns historical photographs into paintings,” says
Kelley, today a consulting curator of contemporary art at San Francisco’s
Asian Art Museum. “There’s a tragic dimension to her
work. It’s as if she’s struggling to save the past,
even as she participates in its destruction. That’s a very
modern thing to do, as a painter.
 |
| The Kitchen Goddess: This large canvas
(six and a half feet tall by 10 feet wide) mixes charcoal,
mineral pigments
and linseed oil (see "Painting A Goddess" below). |
“In a way, I think her work is about the
acceptance of the dissolution of history and memory, and the struggle
to hold onto something
from the past.”
Rena Bransten represents Liu at her influential gallery in
San Francisco. “Hung is a unique artist, a fascinating blend
of Chinese and American painting styles,” she says. “She’s
very much an international figure, with galleries and museums now
showing her work in New York, Paris, London and elsewhere around
the world.
“I think she’s probably best-known for the ‘veils’ of
runneling paint that give so many of her paintings a hazy, mysterious
quality . . . creating images that are like aging, fading photographs.”
Emily Sano, director of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco,
which hosts two large-scale Liu portraits, says the key to
her “haunting
power” as an artist is her “remarkable combination
of intelligence and boldness,” when attacking a canvas. “Her
skills and her technique are profound, of course,” says Sano, “but
what really sets her apart is her humanity. Her portraits of struggling,
obscure human beings are deeply affecting. They overwhelm you,
and you cannot forget them.”
Now 58, Liu appears to be at the top of her game. Later this
year, both the San Francisco and Oakland International Airports
will
unveil giant-sized murals by Liu that will become permanent
features of these frenetic urban landscapes. For Liu, the
San Francisco
installation will nicely symbolize her amazing life’s journey—since
the giant mural (Takeoff!) of a small boy chasing a great white
bird is displayed at the same airport where she landed with $20
to her name, in 1984.
 |
| Going Away, Coming Home: The panels of Hung Liu's 160-foot
window (part of which can be seen above) were fabricated at
the Derix Glasstudios in Taunusstein, Germany, and installed
at Oakland Airport this summer. |
“I love life, in spite of all the tragedies,” she says with
a bright smile, “and I still believe in my paintings. I still
want to do them, stroke by stroke. As you get older, things become
wonderfully complex, wonderfully complicated. We suffered under
the Cultural Revolution, yes—but there was also a wonderful
innocence there, as we dreamed of justice for everyone.
“Now I live in the West, but that is complicated, too—because
I see profound problems with capitalism. So nothing is simple,
you see? And I think it becomes very important to keep your sense
of humor!”
That sense of humor is clearly at work in Liu’s studio bathroom,
where she hung a collage done by a friend. It features a glowering
portrait of Mao waving his Little Red Book, along with an image
of one of the West’s most popular icons, the Nike tennis-shoe
logo. Beneath, a boldface legend declares: READ CHAIRMAN MAO’S
LITTLE RED BOOK—JUST DO IT!
“One of the best things I learned from Allan Kaprow was the importance
of playfulness, the importance of laughter, in shaping
any work of art,” says the high-flying Liu. “I hope
I’ve
learned that lesson well, and I want to go on making
paintings as long as I can—paintings that will continue
to celebrate laughter, and love, and life!”
Painting
a Goddess
Drop by Hung Liu’s crowded, paint-spattered studio
in Oakland, Calif., on a typical weekday afternoon, and you’ll
probably find the muralist struggling passionately to “capture
a moment of human feeling” on one of her giant-sized
canvases.
Today she’s working on the
massive oil portrait of an elderly Chinese woman: The Kitchen
Goddess.
The stretched canvas is six and
a half feet tall, and 10 feet wide, and the half-completed
figure—cunningly
assembled from charcoal and mineral pigments and linseed
oil—vibrates with human energy, as she reaches toward
a copper pot in the kitchen of some obscure village in rural
China.
“I don’t plan ahead,” says Liu. “I
just step up to the canvas and do it. First I draw the figures
with charcoal or pencil or pastels. Then I mix the colors
with linseed oil, which thins them out and makes them wet
and runny.”
Now she steps back 10 or 12 feet,
eyeballs The Kitchen Goddess’s half-painted cheek. “I want the paint
to look solid, so I put on layers. Like a sculpture. I don’t
analyze—no way! I feel it, that’s all. It flows
out of my hands. When I am painting, my body has memory,
like a dancer.
“If you work long enough, you know what the canvas needs!”
Back and forth she goes, from one
side of the studio to the other. Paint and then eyeball.
A touch of shadow here,
a gleam of light there. The brush licks at the surface of
the fabric, sighs against the tightly-stretched canvas. And
the old woman, The Kitchen Goddess, is coming alive. “An
old woman, cooking something, maybe like my grandmother in
Manchuria—her whole life cooking for other people.
Who knows?
“I want to paint without expectations. Paint a face,
maybe a flower—or just paint light! Huh? Paint like
a child. Let it be.”
But sometimes “letting it be” means facing up
to human suffering. Another canvas, looming nearby, contains
half a dozen Chinese men who are about
to die. They were slave laborers, who were forced to work in Japan, toward
the end of World War II. Liu found them in a yellowing photograph, deep in
the historical archives in Beijing. She did some research, and she learned
they were prisoners of war, who had refused to work anymore, and had simply
marched together into the sea.
Some were shot to death immediately by their captors; the
rest drowned in the waves.
Hung has painted them in gentle sunlight, standing side
by side in a field of vivid cherry blossoms and windblown
weeds. The doomed Chinese men have now been preserved in
paint. The historical photo has become a compassionate vision.
“I am trying to give them a memorial,” she says.
Sometimes, the figures in the painting will tell me: Throw
some red here! Put in a bit of sunlight there! And for a
moment I wonder: Who is doing this painting? Where is it
coming from?
“A memorial offering. Trying to honor them. Everyone
from prostitutes to refugees to laborers to children who
died young—they all deserve something, they all deserve
to be painted. And I want to paint them so big that you cannot
look away!” |
Tom Nugent is a freelance writer. His last article for @UCSD
Magazine was on Tim Roemer, ’79, and the 9/11 Commission.
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UCSD's Department of Visual Arts
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Hung Liu
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Hung Liu's Paintings and the Polity of Immigrants
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Full Circle: Revolutions in the Paintings of Hung Liu
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Works & Conversations:
Conversation with Hung Liu
VIEW |
"I am trying to give them a memorial...
A memorial offering. Trying
to honor them. Everyone from prostitutes to refugees to laborers to children who
died young—
they all deserve something, they all deserve to be painted. And I want to paint them so big that you cannot look away!" |
|
