Oct 26, 2021,10:27am EDT
Hung Liu’s Crying Canvases Reframe Immigration Stories At Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery
Chadd ScottContributor
Resident Alien. Artist: Hung Liu. Oil on canvas, 1988. Collection of the San Jose Museum of Art. ... [+]
© HUNG LIU
The popular American immigration fantasy focuses on the positive. On the receiving end. On America’s welcoming arms for “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Horatio Alger success stories.
This conversation positions migrants as eager American citizens starting exciting new lives, not as people with full–and generally tragic–histories before wanting–and generally needing–to uproot themselves and go to America.
Immigrants dating all the way back to the European colonizers of North America didn’t pull up stakes to try making a new life here because it was their preferred option. They were forced to leave by religious persecution, famine, poverty, plagues, war, natural disasters–traumas. Precious few people choose to dislocate themselves and their families from their homes to roll the dice on a new life in a country where they don’t speak the language, have little money and often aren’t welcome for the “adventure” of it.
Artist Hung Liu (b. 1948 in Changchun, China; d. 2021 in Oakland, CA)–as a former immigrant fleeing political persecution herself–reminds audiences that an immigrant’s story upon arriving in America represents merely the tip of that person’s personal iceberg in an achingly beautiful exhibition of her paintings, “Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands,” on view now at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C..
Liu’s imagery often takes its inspiration from photographs. Her lifelong interest in pictures spawned from the terror of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. Because Liu’s family was educated, they were viewed as a threat to the communist Chinese government.
In the late 1960’s Liu and her mother removed the photographs from their family albums to protect them from being taken by Mao’s Red Guard. Liu’s mother hid some of the pictures and set fire to the rest. She also burned her journals.
During the Cultural Revolution, many people in China destroyed their personal records out of fear; Liu’s family among countless others felt compelled to erase the past so as not to leave any trace of their privileged lives.
“You couldn't keep anything personal, it was dangerous,” Liu said during her lifetime. “That's why I'm so interested in old photographs, they are rare, it is not like today.”
Liu would carry the surviving photographs with her for the remainder of her life.
Liu’s suffering at the hands of Mao would extend beyond the loss of family mementos. Her father was taken political prisoner by the Communists in 1948 when the artist was still an infant. Barred from contact with the outside world, Liu wouldn’t reconnect with him until 1994.
In her early 20s she was sent to four years of forced agrarian labor.
“It is very necessary for the educated youth to go to the countryside and undergo re-education by the poor peasants,” Mao said at the time.
Mao’s mania for a totalitarian state under his control would consume millions of lives via forced labor, purges, starvation and execution. Liu was able to escape in 1984 when, after four years of effort following a thaw in U.S.-China relations due to Richard Nixon’s visit to the country in 1972, she secured a passport from the central government to continue her art studies at the University of California in San Diego.
Women and Children First
Strange Fruit: Comfort Women. Artist: Hung Liu. Oil on canvas 2001 Karen and Robert Duncan ... [+]
© HUNG LIU.
Having lived through wars, political revolutions, exile and displacement herself, Liu presents a complex, multifaceted picture of not only an immigrant experience broadly, but an Asian Pacific American experience specifically. This is the first time the Portrait Gallery honors an Asian American woman with a solo exhibition.
Not surprisingly, Liu’s paintings spotlight women and children. Through a career spanning half a century, she portrayed refugees, women soldiers, migrant laborers, prostitutes, orphaned children and other overlooked individuals whom she described as “lost souls” or “spirit ghosts.”
“I want my work to be a comfort to people I've never known,” Liu said.
An especially dramatic painting from the exhibition, Strange Fruit: Comfort Women (2001, oil on canvas, 80 x 160), pulls this all together.
In the early 1990s, Liu discovered a collection of photographs that prompted her to examine the history of comfort women. Through her research she learned about Korean women who had been forced to work as sex slaves for the Japanese Imperial Army; the source photograph for Strange Fruit: Comfort Women was taken by the Japanese military.
“Hung Liu used red paint to erase the soldiers that appeared in the background so she could focus on the group of women,” Dorothy Moss, the National Portrait Gallery’s curator of painting and sculpture and exhibition curator, explained at a virtual press preview for the exhibition. “Each woman represented conveys a strong individual presence; Hung Liu chose to paint the subjects with distinct varied expressions of fear, hopelessness, strength, courage and even anger. Some make eye contact with the viewer, yet their very existence is dissolving into the materiality of the paint with its washes and drips.”
Liu employed generous amounts of linseed oil in her paintings to create what she described as a “veil of tears;” her husband, art writer Jeff Kelly, has termed Liu’s signature “wash” as “Weeping Realism.”
The “wash” has a knee-buckling effect as the painting appears to cry for its subjects. Painting with extraordinary empathy. It’s not difficult imaging Liu crying as she put paint to canvas.
“(Liu) said that we are able to adopt ancestors and she described her paintings as memorial sites,” Moss, who was friendly with the artist for years, remembers.
Mao
Avant-Garde. Artist: Hung Liu. Oil on shaped canvas, oil on wood, 1993. San Francisco Museum of ... [+]
PHOTO: KATHERINE DU TIEL © HUNG LIU
“Portraits of Promised Lands” begins with portraits Liu created as a field laborer during her agrarian “reeducation” in Maoist China (1968–1972), revealing the roots of her empathy for migrant workers and the compassion that her most recent portraits evoke. It progresses throughout her evolution as an artist, including her searing “Where Is Mao?” series, a group of 10 graphite-on-canvas drawings that illustrate an oftentimes faceless Mao meeting with various political leaders.
“Hung Liu initially trusted the communist movement and its call for change, but she watched in horror as Mao’s policies unfolded resulting in the killing and starvation of millions of Chinese citizens,” Moss said. “’Where is Mao’ explores their collective memories associated with the communist leader. Liu felt compelled to create some of the historic images without Mao’s facial features, she viewed these sketches as anti-monuments, explaining at the time she was, ‘trying to find my own identity as a Chinese person in America. I was erasing Mao’s because, after all, he didn't need a face, even without a face you could tell it was him.’”
In Memoriam
Hung Liu died on August 7, 2021 just days before the Portrait Gallery exhibition would open following a brief battle with pancreatic cancer.
“Portraits of Promised Lands” features more than 50 paintings, photographs and drawings from her earliest work in the 1970s to her most recent large-scale paintings, a series of which based on Dorothea Lange’s Depression Era photography she was still working on.
The exhibition closes on May 30, 2022 and will not be traveling beyond Washington, D.C.. A separate exhibition of her work can be seen now through March 13, 2022 at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.