Hung Liu: Control and Freedom

Vicki Myhren Gallery

University of Denver

2121 E. Asbury Avenue, Denver, CO 80210

January 11–March 24, 2024

Admission: free

Review by Zoe Ariyama

The first image you encounter in Hung Liu: Control and Freedom, on view at Vicki Myhren Gallery until March 24, is a self-portrait: a young Liu sits on a log bridge, pants rolled up to her knees as she dangles her feet into the river below, smiling and squinting into the sun. The photograph captures Liu during her years of “proletariat re-education” working rice and wheat fields in the Chinese countryside from 1968 to 1972, as ordered by the Mao regime’s Cultural Revolution.

Hung Liu, *Village Portrait: Broken Bridge*, 2013, mixed media (duo-tone) on panel, 12.5 x 13.25 inches. Image courtesy of the Vicki Myhren Gallery.

Returning to the photo forty years later, the artist processed the image in gold duotone to create a shimmering sepia effect. As the gallery lights shine through the resin encasement, a rippled shadow is cast along the edges—a memory held but shifted, corroded or nostalgized, by the passage of time.

An installation view of the exhibition *Hung Liu:* *Control and Freedom* at the Vicki Myhren Gallery at the University of Denver. Image by *DARIA*.

Upon returning to Beijing, Liu enrolled at the Central Academy of Fine Art to study mural painting in the socialist realist style. The experience prepared her to create works on a large scale using academic art techniques, although only to produce imagery that served the Communist party. In 1984, after years of applying for travel documents, Liu moved to the United States to attend the University of California, San Diego, crossing paths with artists including Allan Kaprow, Lorna Simpson, and Hal Fischer. [1] The contrast between these two foundational experiences is stark, and Liu explored the nuances of her past and present identities as comrade, artist, immigrant, and citizen, for her entire artistic career.

An installation view of the exhibition *Hung Liu:* *Control and Freedom* at the Vicki Myhren Gallery. Image by *DARIA*.

Geoffrey Shamos, Director of Vicki Myhren Gallery, notes that the works in the exhibition are not arranged chronologically or by rigid themes, but rather in consideration of how each piece speaks across the space to another. This method is fitting—Liu was prolific and often returned to concepts, using new lenses and mediums, over several decades. Collage, oil painting, photography, lithography, tapestry, and found-object assemblage, among others, all make appearances.

Hung Liu, *Relic: VIII*, 2004, oil on canvas with wooden box, 66 x 66 inches. Image by *DARIA*.

The subjects of Liu’s artworks are drawn from the artist’s collection of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century photographs, many being images of laborers, sex workers, refugees, and soldiers. She understood these figures as having “no name, no bio, no story left,” and would manifest these “lost souls” through paintings as sites of memorial. [2] Liu’s Relic VIII (2004) depicts two seated women dressed in fresh pink and lilac with flowers in their hair, locking eyes with the viewer. The figures are from a photograph advertising them for prostitution, and, with swathes of color and drips of linseed oil-thinned pigment, their bodies begin to melt away, echoing their gradual disappearance from memory. [3]

Hung Liu, *Golden Lotus*, 1990, oil and silk on canvas (diptych), 48 x 56 inches. Image by *DARIA*.

Another nearby artwork, Golden Lotus (1990), which is also the oldest artwork of Liu’s on display, places together two seemingly opposing representations of the ideal Chinese woman—a soldier of the revolution in a propagandistic ballet versus the traditional beauty of bound “lotus” feet. Inlaid photographic references reveal harsher realities. Liu challenges the state-sanctioned portrayals of life under the Chinese Communist Party through her usage of photographs, which are the historical records of individuals that she would not allow to be censored.

Hung Liu, *Modern Time*, 2005, oil on canvas with lacquered wood and Cultural Revolution clocks, 66 x 168 inches. Image by *DARIA*.

The largest artwork in the exhibition, Modern Time (2005), is at the center of the gallery. On each of the two adjoining panels, we see a figure, chin in hand, gazing at four portraits hanging above her on a red wall. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin loom over the right panel, while four portraits by Vincent van Gogh of everyday people—a postman, a soldier, himself—hang on the left.

The left panel of Hung Liu’s *Modern Time*, 2005, oil on canvas with lacquered wood and Cultural Revolution clocks, 66 x 168 inches. Image by *DARIA*.

Liu fills the left panel with gestural circles and thick drips of paint, a motif of disruptive imperfection in Liu’s work, which peter out before reaching the right side. On red lacquered wood shelves sit three vintage alarm clocks with faces decorated with Socialist Realist illustrations of smiling workers beneath a gleaming Mao Zedong.

A detail view of one of the Cultural Revolution clocks in Hung Liu’s *Modern Time*. Image by *DARIA*.

The diptych displays the exhibition’s titular opposition of “control” and “freedom,” proposed here as the central tension of Liu’s artworks rooted in the legacy of the Cultural Revolution. There’s room to question whether this divide is too easy for an artist working within the slipperiness of historical memory. But Liu acknowledged these supposed binaries, and the people caught between them. She actively sought to unsettle past/present, traditional/modern, East/West, and good/bad in her artworks.

Hung Liu, *For the Struggle Carries On*, 2009, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches. Image by *DARIA*.

I keep coming back to For the Struggle Carries On (2009). Liu closely crops an image of a soldier holding a pistol toward another figure, whose face is mostly obscured by a wall of paint drips weeping down the canvas. Each person looks young and determined in this moment, and Liu is sensitive to both. The artist places a butterfly in the foreground, which a gallery-provided sheet explains as commonly representing transformation, freedom, and love. [4] Here, though, the butterfly seems fragile and caught amid the violence, highlighting the fleetingness of these figures’ lives compared to the longevity of the regime. With thick, confident applications of paint and melting linseed rivulets, Liu rejects the false clarity of socialist realism.

Hung Liu, *Laundry Lady*, 1995, oil on shaped canvas, 72 x 38 inches. Image by *DARIA*.

Later in her career, Liu began to focus on Depression-era photographs of Americans, recognizing those same expressions of resilience in the midst of upheaval. Liu paints these subjects as unsettled fragments: a Chinese woman sitting expectantly outside her laundry; the shadowed face of a Black man in overalls and a crisp shirt, with a red sun rising or setting behind him; a child’s furrowed brow as a gust of wind blows their hair.

Hung Liu, *Old Black Joe*, 2016, oil on canvas, 41 x 41 inches. Image by *DARIA*.

The sensitive portraits illustrate Liu’s continued commitment to magnifying individuals at the margins of society and their human resemblances no matter their nation or origin. In August 2021, just after the artist’s death, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., opened Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands, centering this aspect of Liu’s expansive body of work.

Hung Liu, *The Tale of Da Fan Che #3*, 2004, mixed media, 60 x 60 inches. Image by *DARIA*.

Despite its relatively small size, the current exhibition, Hung Liu: Control and Freedom, impressively demonstrates the strength and breadth of Liu’s artistic practice. Each work is full to the brim, some with almost overwhelming detail, though they allow for new understandings with every glance. Liu’s subjects demand the same careful attention from the viewer as given by the artist, calling for us to remember.

Zoe Ariyama (she/her) is a writer/reader currently located in Denver. She holds a BA in Art History and Political Economy from Tulane University, and focuses on projects considering Asian American makers, institutional memory, and the oddities of the art market.

[1] From www.hungliu.com/timeline.html.

[2] Quoted in the opening wall text, www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/the-revolutionary-portraiture-of-hung-liu-180978820/.

[3] Photograph source discussed in Hung Liu: Control and Freedom gallery guide, p. 5.

[4] Symbols in Hung Liu’s Art, Vicki Myhren Gallery, p. 2.