Hung Liu’s (刘虹) solo exhibition Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands is on view at National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.
The history
From the curator Dorothy Moss’s introduction:
For the artist Hung Liu (1948-2021), engaging with portraiture was always an act of empathy. During her life, she paid tribute to hundreds of individuals through her practice of expanding upon photographic imagery to create complex, multilayered paintings.
Her work is about history, a subject that it is sentimental and dear.
“History is not a static image or a frozen story.” she observed. “It is always flowing forward.”
Her words reminds me of Adam Pendleton, whom I known from the exhibited work Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? (2021–2022) at MoMA. Adam Pendleton similarly said:
History is an endless variation, a machine upon which we can project ourselves and our ideas. That is to say it is our present moment.
Family, the always with us
History, particularly the family history. I keeps going back to them in my PhD years. History is merely a way of understanding who we are, and justifying why we are here. We need to answer these questions in the PhD years. The answers to these questions are also important because the world cease to remain calm and stationary. Upon answering these questions, history are kept alive as a narrative. And are also reshaped through one’s experience:
Liu’s “portraits of promised lands” represent her family members as well as anonymous subjects. Over the course of five decades, she portrayed refugees, women soldiers, migrant laborers, prostitutes, orphaned children, and other overlooked individuals, whom she described as lost souls or “spirit-ghosts.” Liu reimagined their stories and honored them with her brush.
For Liu, creating portraits of her family was a way of “summoning ghosts.” She said, “They are with me all the time, but I cannot reach them.” Liu’s memories of her family are embedded in all of her portraits. She used color, texture, found objects, and shaped canvases to transport her family members into our contemporary moment, inviting us to look upon them as though they were our own.
Indeed. The act of commemorating them is to spiritize them.
But unfortunately, for most, memory are not well preserved. Including me, I can only keep thinking about them to hold them dear.
After those special time, those who went through could be either too traumatized, too ashamed, or to scared that they rarely share or express. Liu, however, is brave to share, and lucky enough to be able to externalize the commemoration process through painting.
Liu, like Sandburg, used imagery to give voice to the forgotten. For her, though, was "in the process of painting, [where] the invisible becomes visible, and the anonymous becomes familiar.
This also remember me of a traditional saying that copying as a means of understanding:
书读百遍、其义自现。
Hijacking the avant-garde
Liu mimics the Mao’s hijacking of avant-garde, i.e., revolution, by hijacking the avant-garde, i.e., Monet, in the painting Avant-Garde (1993). Lovely.