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Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands
"I want my work to be a comfort to people I've never known. "
-- Hung Liu, 2020
For the artist Hung Liu, engaging with portraiture is an act of empathy. Since the 1980s, she has paid tribute to hundreds of individuals through her practice of expanding upon photographic imagery to create complex, multilayered paintings. "History is not a static image or a frozen story," she observes. "It is always flowing forward."
Liu, who was born in Changchun, China, in 1948, experienced political revolution, exile, and displacement before immigrating to the United States. She came of age during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution (1966–76) and was consequently forced to labor in the fields for four years in her early twenties. In 1984, after studying art in Beijing. Liu left China in to attend graduate school at the University of California, San Diego. There, the experimental tendencies of fellow students and faculty members, such as the foundational performance artist Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) and the feminist art historian Moira Roth (born 1933), cultivated her conceptual approach to portraiture.
Liu's "portraits of promised lands" represent her family members as well as anonymous subjects. Over the past five decades, she has portrayed refugees, prostitutes, migrant laborers, women soldiers, orphaned children, and other overlooked individuals, whom she describes as lost souls or "spirit-ghosts." Liu reimagines their stories and seeks to honor them with her brush.
Unless otherwise noted, all works are by Hung Liu. |