The first show of the Fall season at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, entitled “American Exodus,” new oil paintings and watercolors by Hung Liu, opens on September 8 and continues through October 22. This is the artist’s first body of work addressing American subject matter, images of the Dustbowl and Depression after photographs of Dorothea Lange. Jeff Kelley has written about this exhibition, which is accompanied by a catalogue with three essays, and an interview with the artist.

“American Exodus”
Hung Liu is primarily known as a painter of Chinese subjects, typically from the 19th and 20th centuries. Born in China in 1948, and living through the war, famine, and perpetual revolution of the Maoist era, it is little wonder that Liu’s paintings, since immigrating to America in 1984, are based on historical Chinese photographs. Her new paintings, however, are based upon the Dustbowl and Depression era photographs of American documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, whom Liu has long admired.

A resident of Oakland, California, the artist – whose retrospective exhibition was organized by the Oakland Museum of California in 2013 – was surprised to learn that her hometown museum was also the repository of Lange’s photographic archive. It also turns out that 2015 was the 50th anniversary of Ms. Lange’s death, and that 2016 will be the 50th anniversary of the establishment of her archive. Thus, since the fall of 2015, Liu has made regular research trips to the Lange Archive to select photographs from which to make paintings.

As a painter, Liu challenges the documentary authority of photographs by subjecting them to the more reflective process of painting. Indeed, much of the meaning of her paintings comes from the way the washes and drips dissolve the photo-based images, suggesting the passage of memory into history, while working to uncover the cultural and personal narratives fixed – but often concealed – in the photographic instant. She has written: “I want to both preserve and destroy the image.” Given the historical, often tragic subject matter she represents, her style is a kind of weeping realism.

Shifting focus from the people in Chinese historical photographs to the migrants in the
Depression-era photographs of Dorothea Lange may seem a surprise to Hung Liu’s
audience, at first. But by training her attention on the displaced individuals and
wandering families of the American Dustbowl (and beyond), Liu takes a second look at
a society’s photographic remnants, and what she finds in Lange’s photographs are
subjects whose overarching struggle and underlying humanity are not so different from
the Chinese refugees, soldiers, prostitutes, and workers she has painted for decades. In
Liu’s paintings, all are caught by the camera in an everlasting moment and then
summoned, like ghosts, onto the waiting canvas, where they are painted in a mineral
ground and washed in linseed oil.

The meaningful distinction is that the subjects in Liu’s new paintings are American
peasants who, unlike their Chinese counterparts, may be stuck in poverty, but not in
place. Chinese peasants are often scattered to the winds by the forces of history, while
the Okies and Bindlestiffs in Lange’s photographs, though desperately poor, tend to be
on the move, or settled temporarily in migrant camps. They were scattered by the forces
of nature. Their common goal was to get to California, the promised land. Within twenty
years of Lange’s photographs, mobility would become the great American metaphor.
Though many of these migrants came to bitter ends, they most always came from
somewhere else.

Trained in China as a Socialist Realist, Liu studied mural painting at the Central
Academy of Fine Art in Beijing before immigrating to the United States to attend the
University of California, San Diego. There, she was confronted not with the exhortation
that art should “serve the people heart and soul,” but with the expectation that the artist
should innovate and experiment. Over the years, however, Liu’s painting hand began to
loosen its touch, allowing drips of paint and washes of linseed oil to run down the
cotton-duck weave, sometimes draining away images like gravity drains life, or time
blurs memory. In fact, the photographs were washed and blurry to begin with, so that
their imperfections gave the painter license to improvise with her brush. In this she was
reminded of ancient Chinese scholar-painters who used their own ink-filled hair to write
calligraphy on mulberry paper – an enactment reinforced by her UCSD mentor, Allan
Kaprow (the inventor of Happenings in the late 1950s). But more than anything, Liu’s
fluid style of realism was a deeply personal critique of the rigid socialist realism in
which she had been trained. Her great achievement as a painter has been to criticize the
means of realist painting itself in order to arrive at a deeper sense of the subject’s truth.
In this, Dorothea Lange gets Liu closer than ever to the pathos of their now-shared
subjects. For this first time, thirty years after leaving China, Hung Liu’s weeping realism
– like Lange’s dusty documentary photographs – is fully American; social, but no longer
socialist.

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 local
farmers with their families and also made drawings of them. In 1972 she entered the
Revolutionary Entertainment Department of Beijing’s Teachers College to study art and
education. After graduating in 1975 she began teaching art at an elite Beijing school,
Jing Shan, and also began to teach a program for children on television, “How to Draw
and Paint,” which lasted several years and was renowned. In 1979 she attended the
Central Academy of Fine Arts where she majored in mural painting. In 1980 she applied
to the visual arts program at the University of California, San Diego. After being
accepted, it took Liu four years to obtain a passport from the Chinese government. She
arrived in California in 1984.

Hung Liu’s work has been shown at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; The
Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia; Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, Maryland; The
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; de Saissset
Museum, Santa Clara University, California; The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco,
de Young Museum, California; Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Indiana; Fred Jones Jr.
Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, Norman; Heckscher Museum of Art,
Huntington, New York; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin;
Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee; Monterey Museum of Art, California; National
Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; New Britain
Museum of American Art, Connecticut; Oakland Museum of California; Polk Museum
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of Art, Lakeland, Florida; Rutgers University, Paul Robeson Gallery, Newark, New
Jersey; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; San Jose Museum of Art,
California; Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan, Republic of China.

The artist’s work is included in the collections of Asian Art Museum, San Francisco,
California; Boise Art Museum, Idaho; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; City of San
Francisco, California; City of San Jose, California; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento,
California; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, de
Young Museum, California; Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Indiana; Hunter Museum of
American Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and
Design, Kansas City, Missouri; Kings County Public Collection, Washington; Library of
Congress, Washington; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Metropolitan
Museum, of Art, New York; Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, California; Monterey
Museum of Art, California; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; National
Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; National Museum
of Women in Art, Washington, D.C.; Nevada Art Museum, Reno; New Britain Museum
of American Art, Connecticut; Oakland Museum of California; Palm Springs Art
Museum, California; Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, Florida; San Francisco Federal
Building, California; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; San Jose
Museum of Art, California; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California; Walker Art
Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
She has received commissions for public art projects from Capp Street Project, San
Francisco; City of Cerritos; Civic Center, San Francisco; Embarcadero Center, San
Francisco; Highland Hospital, Oakland; Moscone Convention Center, San Francisco; San
Francisco International Airport; Oakland International Airport; San Jose Museum of Art
and the City of San Jose Collection; University of California, San Diego, all in California;
and at the Center Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China.

The artist has twice been awarded a Painting Fellowship from the National Endowment
for the Arts; Capp Street Project Stipend, California College of Arts & Crafts, San
Francisco; Eureka Fellowship in Painting, The Fleishhacher Foundation, San Francisco;
The Joan Mitchell Foundation, Painters Sculptors Grant, New York, New York; Russell
Foundation Grant, University of California, San Diego. She has won the San Francisco
Women’s Center Humanities Award, California; Contemporary Art by Women of Color
Artists’ Award, Guadalupe Cultural Center, San Antonio, Texas and Society for the
Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) Award, San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, California. She was Distinguished Artist in Residence, Jerome M. and Wanda Otey
Westheimer Chair, University of Oklahoma, Norman, and has also received grants and
scholarships from the University of California, San Diego and Mills College, Oakland,
California.

Hung Liu resides in Oakland, California.

For further information and/or photographs please call 212-966-6676 or e-mail Nancy
Hoffman Gallery at info@nancyhoffmangallery.com.