HUNG LIU: A Painter’s Painter (February 17, 1948 – August 7, 2021)

By Lenore Chinn. Posted Sept. 8, 2021.

Words alone cannot express the bittersweet sadness at the untimely passing of our beloved artist and friend, Hung Liu.

On the eve of what would have been a crowning achievement to her illustrious career with the opening of a solo show at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, “Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands,” our dear Hung joined the ancestors.

This is an unfathomable loss to her family, Jeff Kelley and son, Ling Chen Kelley, and to her arts community.

I first met Hung Liu many years ago through her mentor and fellow art professor at Mills College, Moira Roth, who passed recently, and her good friend, artist Flo Oy Wong. Through them I became acquainted with her burgeoning body of work, starting with an exhibit I saw at San Francisco’s #1 Embarcadero Center, Sky Deck on the 41st floor in 1996.

“The Long Wharf” included seven of her paintings inspired by archival photographs of maritime ships in the San Francisco Bay during the gold rush years. On view were small displays of architectural fragments and artifacts from the era, recalling a time when Chinese shrimp fishing junks plied the waters.

Hung’s method of researching historical photographs would become a lifelong strategy as she mined vintage black and whites for her canvases, translating and recreating visual narratives that gave dignity to her subjects.

Painting from “The Long Wharf” courtesy of HungLiu.com.

Influenced by her own experiences in China during the tumultuous upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, she surreptitiously rendered and saved a series of small studies, portraits and landscapes done when she was sent to the countryside for “re-education.” Using a camera given to her by a friend, she also learned to photograph daily village life. All of these efforts would have been deemed contraband by the government with severe repercussions had they not been concealed.

Resisting the edict of what was considered acceptable in style and subject matter to create she managed to survive that period and went on to study at Beijing Teachers College and received her Graduate Degree in Mural Painting from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1981.

After numerous attempts to secure a passport from the Chinese government to travel to the United States she was finally granted permission and in 1984 she enrolled in the M.F.A. program at University of California, San Diego. Studying under conceptual artist Allan Kaprow she was introduced to new and liberating ideas which would spark innovative approaches to her art.

Hung would also meet her future husband, art critic, curator and studio manager, Jeff Kelley, during her time there.

For me as an artist, a painter and photographer, I would be hard pressed to pick just one or two favorites in Hung Liu’s expansive body of work. Paintings, works on paper, mixed media, sometimes with a bird cage attached, or installations with thousands of fortune cookies, would be employed in her arsenal of ideas. Her works were at once insightful and transgressive in illuminating the hidden stories of subjects largely absent in the public’s consciousness here and in China.

Familiar images from formal portraits staged for the Qing Dynasty’s Empress Dowager Cixi, shrouded in mystery and interpreted from a Western orientalist and othering point of view, can be seen with less noble personages, reimagined and empowered in Hung’s sweeping narratives. Even the gaze, typically deferring to a male perspective of female subordination, has been subverted.

Layered in dripping linseed oil washes and thick layers of brightly saturated paint, her canvases were populated with symbolic Chinese metaphors, circles, birds and flowers, insects, codes of resistance and perseverance, carriers of peace and blessings, and harbingers of hope.

She often confessed to resurrecting “ghosts,” laborers, women who toiled in the countryside and migrant workers made visible by photographer Dorothea Lange during the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s and 1940s. Lange’s photographs from the archives of the Oakland Museum of California would become another inspirational source for Hung’s paintings.

Sightings

On a visit to Art Market San Francisco in 2018 at Ft. Mason I caught a woman standing mesmerized in front of a wall featuring a painting by Hung, “South – Gold” (2018) and a three watercolors on paper, “Companions” (2017), “Rural Slum” (2016), and “Field Break” (2016). I captured this moment and sent it to Hung.

“South – Gold,” Art Market, Ft. Mason, San Francisco, 2018. Photo by Lenore Chinn.

I enjoyed encountering Hung’s works and there were ample opportunities in my travels.

San Francisco International Airport boasts several pieces at Gate A5 (“Take Off,” 2006 – 2008) and Oakland International Airport greets travelers with a magnificent glass mural of flying cranes, “Going Away, Coming Home” (2006) and two paintings reproduced on a small scale, “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” and “Sisterhood,” an image later used for a 2020 Census Billboard with text in Chinese. Hung shared a photo taken by a friend of that one installed on Bayshore Blvd. in San Francisco.

“Take Off,” 2006 – 2008. (San Francisco International Airport). Photo by Lenore Chinn.

“Going Away, Coming Home,” 2006 (Oakland International Airport, detail). Photo by Lenore Chinn.

“Sister Hood” and “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles”(Oakland International Airport, paintings reproduced on a small scale). Photo by Lenore Chinn.

2020 Census Billboard of “Sisterhood” on Bayshore Blvd. (Shared by Hung Liu)

A pleasant surprise during a visit to SFMOMA was seeing “The Botanist” (2013), which I later discovered was a portrait of her grandfather, Liu Weihua.

“The Botanist,” 2013 (Grandfather, Liu Weihua on view at SFMOMA)

On a more personal level I enjoyed her support as an artist when she invited me to be a guest speaker in her painting class at Mills College in 2007. During her introduction she revealed that we were born only a year apart, announcing that she arrived in the Year of the Rat at the beginning of the 12-animal Chinese Zodiac. I followed in the Year of the Ox.

While I didn’t see her often, our moments together were always filled with joy and laughter. At an opening I would ask of her new works, “Is the paint dry?” Walking through the parking lot at Mills College after a talk one afternoon I noticed her colorful shoes and asked, “Where did you get those shoes?” “Zappos!” she exclaimed.

In her somewhat short life Hung Liu’s prolific contributions to the cultural landscape were monumental and magnificent, animated by her intellect and personality.

Hung Liu leaves a lasting legacy and her mark on the world as an extraordinary and inspirational artist and friend, a painter’s painter.

Links

Hung Liu Remembrances

https://flic.kr/s/aHsmWorcjh

Bay Area Public Art Sites

https://mcam.mills.edu/exhibitions/HungLiu_PublicArt.pdf

Chinese for Affirmative Action Reading Room

http://www.hungliu.com/reading-room-1988.html

Hung Liu at Rena Bransten Book Talk with Maria Porges

https://youtu.be/oKH-9THv8y8

www.hungliu.com

Author’s Bio: Lenore Chinn is a painter, photographer, and cultural activist who works to create structures of personal and institutional support that will both sustain critical artistic production and advance movements for social justice.

Portraiture is at the core of her visual art practice whether it is painting or photography – both are employed in her creative process. Her current street photography chronicles a rapidly changing socio-political landscape.

Cover Photo:

Hung Liu in 2014. Photo by Kelliu52 courtesy of Wikimedia.