Lot 109A: Hung Liu - Soul Mates VI

Hung Liu was born in Changchun, China in 1948. She grew up in Beijing during the time of Mao Zedong. After finishing high school in 1968 she was sent to the countryside for four years during the Cultural Revolution where she worked with peasants in rice, wheat, and cornfields seven days a week. During this time, she photographed and painted these people, and they remain the subjects of her paintings today. Hung wants to give these people a life of beauty and respect in her paintings. Hung Liu is undoubtedly one of the most revered contemporary painters in the U.S. as well as in China, with works included in top museum collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and many others. Liu was born in China to a captain in Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Army, her father was captured by Communist forces and imprisoned in a labor camp. Hung and her mother fled to Beijing, where they survived Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward and the mass famine it induced. Hung's mother destroyed all family photos which included Hung's father in order to protect Hung from the Mao regime, which viewed Nationalists and their families as enemies of the people. Hung thus came to treasure family photographs, whether they depicted her own family or someone else's. Hung was sent to the countryside for proletarian "re-education" at age 20, and worked in rice and wheat fields among China's poorest for 364 days a year, for four long years. A friend asked Hung to safeguard her camera during that time, and Hung took secret photographs of the Chinese people alongside whom she toiled. These photographs became her collective family album; they are the basis for her iconic portraits in which she has memorialized these workers' humanity for the last thirty years of her painting practice. In recent years, Hung Liu became fascinated with American Depression-Era photographs. It is not surprising that Liu feels an affinity for the migrants, women, and children whom Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers like Dorothea Lange captured so intimately. Hung attended the Central Academy of Art in Beijing, and waited seven years for the Chinese government to approve her passport to pursue her Master's Degree in painting at U.C. San Diego. Since her arrival in the U.S. in 1984, Hung's works have been collected and exhibited by this nation's top museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Dallas Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, National Museum of Women in the Art, and many, many more. She has created large scale paintings for the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, as well as a major artwork at the Oakland International Airport, and at the San Francisco International Airport. Hung Liu has twice received prestigious fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Additionally, she is a Mills College Professor Emerita.

13.5 x 13.5"

mixed media on panel

2011

Good

Artist