Prodigal Daughters: HUNG LIU

Hong Kong, Oct 2009 – 10 Chancery Lane Gallery is delighted to present the works of Chinese-American artist Hung Liu in her exhibition entitled, Prodigal Daughters. Taking her inspiration from the 1949 film, Daughters of China, Liu reinterprets scenes from the black and white film in vivid color. With intense thickly applied brush strokes, Liu paints ruddy earthen portraits with splashes of bright colors, these eight heroic women who chose to die rather than being captured by the Japanese. In this series, Liu addresses and revisits the intensity and innocence of communist ideology and her development as a person and artist as a result of it. The series of large works will be shown in Hong Kong for the first time.

Liu admits that as a child she was an enthusiastic believer of the Socialist utopian dream and grew up singing proudly the Internationale, the 1872 anthem written by Eugene Pottier for the proletariat masses. Heroism, as seen in the 1949 film Daughters of China, was a strong influence on her and even today she says, “I admired heroes and wanted to be a tough solider. Even today, when I'm wounded, I'd rather lick the blood and get back to work – like the women soldiers in Daughters of China, the 1949 propaganda film.” The film had a significant impact on her, “I saw this film as a child in China, and it shaped my expectations of women as protagonists in the emerging socialist utopia. Of course, utopia never arrived, but a kind of hard won feminism stayed with me the rest of my life, and served me well in America.”

With bold portraits juxtaposed with Chinese symbols, Hung Liu has much to say. She often paints historical concepts that are layered with her trademark circles, Chinese cranes and dripping washes that frame her thickly painted brush strokes. “The new paintings are my way of painting life back into my memories of a propaganda film that, over time, has become a document of the revolutionary sincerity that permeated my childhood.”

Born in Manchuria in 1948 and raised in Beijing, Hung Liu grew up amongst the city’s Communist elite, attending the same prestigious girls’ boarding school as Mao’s and Deng Xiaoping’s daughters. She was re-educated during the Cultural Revolution working seven days a week in the countryside. She later studied art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and then at the University of California, San Diego where she received a degree in visual arts. Her father had a difficult time in China being a captain of the Nationalist Army (the Kuomintang) and was sent to a labor camp. Liu didn’t see him again until she was 46. She is now a tenured professor at Mills College where she teaches painting.

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

The artist’s work is included in the collections of Boise Art Museum, Idaho; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York; 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; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Kansas City, Missouri; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; Oakland Museum of 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. This is her first time to exhibit in Hong Kong.

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; Moscone Convention Center, San Francisco; 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 received 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, California; 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 University of California, San Diego and Mills College, Oakland, California.

For more information and to schedule interviews with Hung Liu please call 2810-0065. Ms. Liu will be in Hong Kong for the opening reception. The exhibition runs from Nov 20th 2009 until Jan 24th 2010.