Love Letter to Oakland
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Hung Liu was a Chinese-born American contemporary artist whose monumental paintings and mixed media works explored photography’s role in shaping collective memory and dignified those lost to traditional historical narratives: the working class, immigrants, laborers, women, and children. Born in Changchun, China in 1948, Liu passed away in Oakland, CA in 2021. As a child, Liu grew up under the communist regime of Mao Zedong. Her father was sent to a labor camp and she would not see him again for 50 years. To avoid retaliation, her mother burned their family photographs of him. This loss influenced Liu’s art, with photography becoming foundational to her work. In her early 20s, during the Cultural Revolution, Liu was sent for ‘re-education’ in the countryside to labor in fields. Here in secret, she photographed and painted portraits of farmers and villagers. In the 1970s, she attended Beijing Teachers College and the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing where she trained in Socialist Realism, the propagandistic style favored by the government. In 1984, Liu moved to the U.S to study at the University of California, San Diego, where she earned her MFA. In 1990, she became a faculty member at Mills College in Oakland, where she taught for over two decades as a beloved mentor. During her first trip back to China in 1991, Liu discovered photographs of 19th-century courtesans. She would go on to paint portraits drawn from historical images of anonymous, marginalized figures or personal family photos that she dripped, layered, and blended with symbolic imagery from ancient Chinese art and Socialist Realism. Her canvases were overlaid with linseed oil, causing the paint to drip in a style she called ‘weeping realism.’ Liu received extensive honors and awards for her work, including two NEA fellowships, the Joan Mitchell Fellowship, the Eureka fellowship, a SECA Award, and a Lifetime Achievement Award in Printmaking from the Southern Graphics Council International. Her work can be found in the public collection of over 50 institutions, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art, DC.
Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands