Hung Liu on The World Stage (Virtual)

Join us online for an artist talk and conversation with artist Hung Liu whose work is featured in The World Stage now on view.

Hung Liu was born in Changchun, China in 1948, growing up under the Maoist regime. Initially trained in the Socialist Realist style, Liu studied mural painting as a graduate student at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, before immigrating to the US in 1984 to attend the University of California, San Diego, where she studied under Allan Kaprow, the American originator of Happenings. Washing her subjects in veils of dripping linseed oil, she both “preserves and destroys the image.” Liu has invented a kind of weeping realism that surrenders to the erosion of memory and the passage of time, while also bringing faded photographic images vividly to life as rich, facile paintings. She summons the ghosts of history to the present. In effect, Liu turns old photographs into new paintings. As a painter, Liu challenges the documentary authority of historical Chinese photographs by subjecting them to the more reflective process of painting. Liu currently lives in Oakland, California. She is Professor Emerita at Mills College, where she has taught since 1990.

This program will be hosted on Zoom. Please have Zoom downloaded and your audio and video features turned on. Please register by Thursday, July 23. A Zoom link will be sent to you Friday morning. Please check your spam folder for the invite as they are sometimes directed there.