 |
Throughout history, exploitation
of women has been customary in China. In the paranoid Mao Regime in which Hung
Liu grew
up, an individual’s rights were subordinated to the interests of the
State, very like a continuation of the Emperor-ruled China of the past. These
realities of history converge with Hung Liu’s personal history to make
her art a haunting paradigm of women’s experience past and present.
Born in 1948, she was a high school senior when she, along with thousands
of other educated Chinese citizens, was forcibly “re-educated” as
part of the disastrous “Cultural Revolution.” Hung Liu was
sent to pick rice in the countryside for 4 years. When she was allowed
to return to Beijing, she earned a BFA degree in 1975 from the prestigious
Central Academy of Fine Art. In 1984 she was permitted to emigrate and
in 1986 she earned a MFA degree at UCLA San Diego. Since 1986 she has been
on the faculty of Mills College, California, and presently Chairs the Department
of Painting.
In China she had been ordered to paint “Tractor Art” (pure realism
glorifying the Mao Regime and easily understood by the masses). She discovered
and fell in love with old photographs, fading portraits of Emperors, their
wives and concubines. These sad faces without hope have the same look as
the faces of present day Chinese women toiling at hard labor. They contradict
the Regime’s upbeat version of Chinese history. The Regime was not
amused when she began inserting contradictory references into her painting.
Yet, Hung’s personal experience confirmed to her the reality beneath
the propaganda.
In her installations, paintings, and prints, images are overlaid
with washes and drips. These are combined with photolithographs and chine
collÄ*. Traditional Chinese symbols of birds, butterflies, fish, dragonflies
etc. are drawn and co-mingled with the applied and printed images. Past and
present, real and symbolic co-exist in her work. She brings these exive assets
to probe thoughtfully her personal issues of being a woman, a Chinese immigrant
and an artist.
Now married to Professor Jeff Kelley of the department of
Philosophy at Berkeley, and with son, L.C., a student in Chinese History
at Beijing, Hung Liu finds herself a reluctant self-exile. Last July at dinner
in her studio with her fellow artist and exile, the poet Bei Dao (runner
up for the Nobel prize last year) and Fred Wakeman, Dean of Far Eastern Studies
at Berkeley and his Chinese wife, it was clear to me--the only non-Chinese
speaker at the table--that despite all, China remains the touchstone of their
world. It is this poignant ambivalence in her art that raises it to its highest
levels.
Michael Berger
2003
|
|
