Hung Liu: The Sun Also Rises at Rena Bransten
Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) weaves a tale of romance and dissolution as expatriate American and British writers and intellectuals explore exotic diversions in the world of bullfighting in Spain. Like Hemingway’s protagonists, painter Hung Liu’s world was transformed by her move to a new country, one with vastly different customs and sights. Liu’s recent exhibition at Rena Bransten shares the title of the earlier novel, and focuses on the artist’s newer subject matter drawn from her adoptive land. For much of her career, her work was almost always thematically tied to her homeland, China. As a young woman growing up during the Cultural Revolution, Liu was eyewitness to the humiliation and suffering endured by intellectuals and anyone perceived as disloyal to Chairman Mao. She herself was sent for four years of “re-education” working in the fields of the countryside.
Early training in a social realist style of art which emphasized imagery favorable to the government, essentially propaganda, came to a halt when the artist moved to California to attend college at U.C. San Diego, where innovative professors like Alan Kaprow proceeded to blow her mind. She never turned back, making her home in California for 36 years, teaching at Mills College since 1990 and garnering critical acclaim for her work. Liu’s historical subject matter provides a framework on which to explore her love of the human face and figure—and the process of painting.
Liu’s work uses realistic drawing as an underpinning for layers of expressionistic oil paint, washy veils of color with luxurious fields of drips cascading down the canvas. Imagery taken from personal and historical photographs of China provided a context of human drama, along with a subtle element of political commentary. Something, her understated commentary perhaps—very much between the lines—resulted in Liu’s long-awaited 2019 retrospective in Beijing being sadly cancelled. This turn of events was a cruel blow to an artist hoping for acknowledgement of her significant accomplishments in her native country, revealing instead the Chinese government’s increasing censorship of artwork.
It was during her traveling retrospective “Summoning Ghosts: The Art and Life of Hung Liu” that Liu discovered that the Oakland Museum, which organized the exhibition, houses the archives of Dorothea Lange’s photographs. These iconic images document the Dustbowl Era, the Depression, and Japanese Internment. Figuring that she had now lived half her life in the US, it seemed a good time to approach new subject matter drawn from her adopted home. While new faces in Liu’s repertoire, they share many of the same qualities as her earlier subjects, individuals caught in a tide of history, introspective, a bit guarded.
California (2020) captures a young man playing guitar, his mouth pursed as though mid-song. Many symbols place the figure in context, the state bird, the quail, inscribed almost as though perched in one of Hung Liu’s signature circles—in Chinese philosophy the circle is a symbol of oneness, the unity of yin and yang. Poppies sprout on lower left and upper right. And a vintage license place puts the scene in CA in 1935, mid-Depression, in the throes of the Dust Bowl migration. This image may evoke music of the era, particularly Woody Guthrie’s iconic folk songs.
Some of Liu’s most powerful works have included images of children caught up in events beyond their scope of comprehension. This remains the case here, as in Pledge of Allegiance 1942 (2019) where a grouping of children with their hands over their hearts is focused on a young Asian girl front and center. Lange had been called to document Japanese internment camps during World War II, and this image of the child evokes our feelings of shame over this chapter of American history, as well as the broader questions of the systemic racism underpinning our society. Through the Window (2020) features a trio of blonde-haired boys gazing from a railroad car as though peering into the distance, wondering what lies ahead. With so much uncertainty in all our lives at this point in time, it is easy to relate to this image of internal questioning made manifest.
In the larger gallery space, Liu presents a group of wall-mounted pieces that relate to her interest in installation. Large cutout figures portray children holding animals, such as Homeless Puppies with Boy (2020). A young boy with closely-cropped hair cradles puppies into his pale green shirt. Emotional relationships of the children to the animals are very close and touching. Images of adults, sharecroppers or others down on their luck, feel a trifle overwrought. Cloud images, also drawn from Lange’s body of work, and circular shapes of painted aluminum hover around and above the figures. These elements may be moved around in response to different spaces, adding a dynamic element to the composition.
By taking the small black and white photographs of Lange and transforming them into large-scale, brightly-colored images, Liu has reconfigured the playing field. Some might argue that her approach dilutes their emotional intensity, but instead one may find the faces and figures acquire a greater universality, a certain timelessness, representing anyone who may feel tired, vulnerable, down on their luck…or just introspective. While honoring the legacy of Lange, she has created a body of work very much her own, with an upbeat humanism born of one who has known great struggle in her life.
Some of the best painting is found in a smaller series of lean-tos, Duster Shacks hanging in the narrow corridor between galleries, the colors and textures of cloth and wood dwellings cobbled together haphazardly speak volumes about the nature of this living situation, much like the homeless tent encampments we now find springing up throughout the country. Subject matter and the painting mesh to create small vignettes of heartbreaking beauty.
Barbara Morris
Hung Liu: The Sun Also Rises closed in November at Rena Bransten Gallery