Studio Lecture Series: Hung Liu

Summoning Ghosts

Hung Liu was born in Changchun, China, in 1948, growing up under the Maoist regime. Initially trained in the Socialist Realist style, Liu studied mural painting as a graduate student at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, before immigrating to the US in 1984 to attend the University of California, San Diego.

Liu challenges the documentary authority of historical Chinese photographs by subjecting them to the more reflective process of painting. Much of the meaning of Liu’s painting emerges from the way the washes and drips dissolve the documentary images, suggesting the passage of memory into history, while working to uncover the cultural and personal narratives fixed—but often concealed—in the photographic instant. Washing her subjects in veils of dripping linseed oil, she both preserves and destroys the image. Liu has invented a kind of weeping realism that surrenders to the erosion of memory and the passage of time, while also bringing faded photographic images vividly to life as rich, facile paintings. She summons the ghosts of history to the present. In effect, Liu turns old photographs into new paintings.

A two-time recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in painting, Liu also received a Lifetime Achievement Award in Printmaking from the Southern Graphics Council International in 2011. A retrospective of Liu’s work, Summoning Ghosts: The Art and Life of Hung Liu, was organized by the Oakland Museum of California in 2013. Her work as been exhibited and collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and the Los Angeles County Museum, among others. 

Liu currently lives in Oakland, California, and is Professor Emerita at Mills College, where she has taught since 1990. Join us as she shares her development as an artist over the course of five decades, from China to her current studio practice.

The Studio Lecture Series is sponsored by the Millicent Greenwell Clapp Fund for Studio Art.

Image: Hung Liu, August, 2017.

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