Hung Liu: Toward Peng-Lai
Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco
May 1 - June 7, 2003
Rena Bransten Gallery presents new paintings by Hung Liu in an exhibition called "Toward Peng-Lai" - toward paradise. Known for paintings drawn largely from Chinese historical photography, Liu's new works display a greater focus on what she calls the "mythic poses" that underlay the photographic surfaces of history. Representing such elemental human activities as laboring, eating, journeying, leaping, fighting, dreaming, and carrying one's burden, these "mythic poses" come from particular Chinese circumstances, but seem epic, tans-historical, and allegorical in the new works. With an overlay of traditional Chinese birds, flowers, insects, dragons, and - most recently - stylized human figures, Liu offers her subjects artistic evidence of their own rich heritage - as if to remind or comfort them.
Also included is a series of small, framed paintings of individual children - "The Baby Paintings." Each portrait has been culled from a single group photograph of Chinese girls attending a mission school in the late 19th century.
In effect, Liu turns old photographs into new paintings, liberating the rigid methodology of socialist realism - the style in which she was trained - as an improvisational painting style that dissolves the photo-realism of propaganda art into a fresh kind of history painting. She converts socialist realism into social realism.
Liu was born in Changchun, China in 1948, growing up under the Maoist regime. She emigrated to the US in 1984 to attend the University of California, San Diego, where she received her MFA. She currently lives in Oakland and is a tenured professor in the art department at Mills College. Her work is included in many major museum collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Walker Art Center, The Dallas Museum of Fine Art, The Spencer Museum of Art, and locally, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Jose Museum of Art, The Oakland Museum, and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museums.
RENA BRANSTEN GALLERY
77 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108
