Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands

Liu, who was born in Changchun, China, experienced political revolution, exile,  and displacement. She came of age during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution ( 1966–76) and was consequently forced to labor in the fields for four years in her early twenties. 

In the late 1960s, Hung Liu and her mother removed photographs from their family albums to protect them from being taken by the Red Guards. During the Cultural Revolution, many people in China destroyed their personal records out of fear. Liu explained, “You couldn’t keep anything personal; it was dangerous. That’s why I’m so interested in old photographs. They are rare.”

In 1984, Liu left China to attend graduate school at the University of California, San Diego. It was there where professors Moira Roth and Allan Kaprow cultivated her conceptual approach to portraiture. Four years later in 1988, she created her most widely known work, Resident Alien. 

Exhibition curator Dorothy Moss takes a closer look at this oversized green card, with commentary from Hung Liu.

Here, Hung Liu’s mother, Liu Zongguang (1922–2011), stands in front of a rural landscape outside of Beijing. After Hung Liu’s father was captured by Communist forces in September 1948, her mother raised her with the help of other relatives and placed great attention on her upbringing and education. 

The careful documentation of Liu’s childhood survived through the years because Liu Zongguang had the foresight to remove several photographs from family albums before they were burned by the Red Guards.
 

In 1994, after locating Xia Peng, Liu traveled from California to China to reunite with him, coincidentally on Father’s Day. She learned that during the intervening four decades, he had often been imprisoned and subjected to hard labor. He was living near Nanjing, on a rural work farm, when Liu found him. 

While this portrait commemorates the intense bond that Hung Liu shared with her father, it also references the long separation they endured. Xia Peng (1921–1996) was detained by Communists and imprisoned in 1948, when Liu was an infant, and until Liu reached her mid-forties, she often imagined that her father must have died.

Hung Liu credits her maternal grandmother, Wang Jushou (1890–1979), with instilling in her a vision of “hard-won feminism.” Liu was close to her grandmother and, reflecting on the process of making this portrait, she noted that she emphasized Wang Jushou’s strong hands because “all her life, she would make shoes [and] clothes” and do laundry by hand.

Inspired by events in Tiananmen Square, Hung Liu created this provocative portrait in 1989. 

Hung Liu’s deep connection to refugees is rooted in her personal experiences. She was empathetically drawn to mothers and children, and this portrait depicts a depleted woman nursing her baby. This focus on mothers and children was her way of advocating for those whom she believed to be the most vulnerable.

In the early 1990s, Hung Liu discovered a collection of photographs that prompted her to investigate the history of “comfort women.” Through her research, she learned about some of the Korean women who had been forced to work as sex slaves for the Japanese Imperial Army. The source photograph for this painting was taken by the Japanese military.

In 2015 Hung Liu discovered the work of Depression Era-photographer Dorothea Lange and became deeply influenced by her subjects of indigent and dispossessed Americans. 

“This landscape of struggle is familiar terrain, reminding me of the epic revolution and displacement in Mao’s China.  Only now I am painting American peasants looking for the promised land.”  —Hung Liu

The source for this painting is Dorothea Lange’s 1936 photograph Young Cotton Picker, San Joaquin Valley. Lange received several assignments to cover the conditions of migratory farmworkers in the fields of California, and many of these workers, including the young woman pictured here, were of Mexican descent.

Today, when discussions revolving around border crossing are prevalent, Hung Liu’s paintings carry renewed meaning.

This black-and-white photograph by Dorothea Lange served as Hung Liu’s source for her portrait South. It shows a group of children in the Mississippi Delta in 1936. A girl sits on the edge of a run-down wooden porch while two boys stand nearby.

By omitting the boys and portraying the girl in a dignified manner, Liu radically changed the image. South reflects the artist’s sustained interest in bringing the lives of women and girls to the fore, a fundamental aspect of her hopeful vision.

“The story of America . . . is a story of desperation, of sadness, of uncertainty, of leaving your home. It is also a story of courage, of sacrifice, of determination, and—more than anything—of hope.” —Hung Liu

Liu initiated the series in 2008, seeking to portray herself during her “Rat Years,” which began when she was born in 1948 and returned at twelve-year increments in the Chinese zodiac calendar. As Liu explained, “Big things happen during ‘your year,’” and 2020 was no exception.