Existing comment:
Father's Day
While this portrait commemorates the intense bond that Hung Liu shared with her father, it also references the long separation they endured. Xia Peng (1921–1996) was detained by Communists and imprisoned in 1948, when Liu was an infant, and until Liu reached her mid-forties, she often imagined that her father must have had died.
In 1994, after locating Xia Peng, Liu traveled from California to China to reunite with him, coincidentally on Father's Day. She learned that during the intervening four decades, he had often been imprisoned and subjected to hard labor. He was living near Nanjing, on a rural work farm, when Liu found him.
Liu's interest in the physicality of shrines and altars, as well as her desire to highlight the past, guided her as she made Father's Day. She shaped the canvas to bring the figures closer to the viewer and incorporated an architectural fragment (from San Francisco's Chinatown) into the visual field.
Oil on shaped canvas and architectural panel, 1994
Entrust for Ariel Steinbaum |