New Works by Hung LiuMarch 3 – June 10, 2012

ABOUT THE ARTISTHung 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 stu-dent at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, before immigrating to the U.S. in 1984 to attend UC San Diego. A two-time recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fel-lowship in painting, Liu also received a Lifetime Acheivement Award in Printmaking from the Southern Graphics Council International in 2011. A retrospective of Liu’s work is being organized by the Oakland Museum of California, scheduled to open February 2013. Liu’s works have been exhibited extensively and collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and the Los Angeles County Museum, among others. Liu currently lives in Oakland, California, where she has been a professor of art at Mills College since 1990.

Multiple histories—social and artistic—course through Hung Liu’s work. With her paintings and works on paper, she has focused, quite literally, on varied eras of China’s past. Nearly all of the com-positions include painted figures based on 19th and 20th century photographs. These individuals are primarily women workers—prostitutes, acrobats, laborers—who navigated that country’s shifting cul-tural conditions, and in Liu’s work, they’re seen with elements that reference the country’s rich history of painting, calligraphy and decorative arts. If her subjects have been more commonly addressed with the camera, and in reproduction via art historical tomes illustrating, say, dynastic scroll paintings or classic poems rendered by master calligraphers, Liu pulls images of the past into a 21st century context using the hands-on medium of oil on canvas.

Liu’s combination of images relay stories and visual cues about a massive nation, one to which the artist was born (and emigrated from), one that’s under-going exponential change. Its visual and cultural histories, and their perception globally, are con-stantly being written. Liu foregrounds this shift with a fluidity of process. She employs techniques that exploit the liquidity of her materials—drips, near calligraphic squiggles, and washy backgrounds that interact with more carefully rendered figurative passages, reflective of her social realist training (at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing), and a broad range of contemporary painting gestures.

The artistic and social influences embodied in her practice coalesce into a complex, potent new form in the series she calls the “Bastard Paintings” (or Za Zhong in Mandarin). These glossy, seemingly straightforward works are a difficult to classify hybrid that draws upon and documents the artist’s own artistic history. With them, she reveals the genealogical threads that connect all her work—without spoiling a sense of mystery—and expands the range of intentions she can smoothly integrate into a single piece. As if the bastard children of painting, printmaking, photography, collage and even sculpture, these works cannot be contained in a single media category. If you add the element of collaboration—the Za Zhong works are created at Trillium Press, with master printer David Salgado—the aesthetic mix becomes even more provocative.

The pieces are densely layered and find the artist going deeper into her visual lexicon.

To make them, Liu looks back to previous works, be they paintings in progress or finished canvases or drawings. With the help of Salgado, these are photographed, cropped and reproduced, at varying scale, on transparent film. The focus is usually on specific figures and/or objects, and they very well might be used in more than one Bastard Painting. In the series, we see recurring faces that become familiar characters in a loose epic narra-tive. (There’s a wonderful irony to the fact that Liu’s painted figures, based on photographs, have in a sense returned to their original form.)

The reproduced images are mounted to a layer of clear resin and become the foundations, the not so blank “canvases,” of new works. Liu can revisit, retool and rework specific figures and objects that she’s painted before. She alters backgrounds, shifts color schemes, and repositions elements. She does this in layers, each separated with 1/8” segments of the resin. On that she’ll paint other marks, and so on. The Bastard works can contain up to 20 lay-ers of activity. Metaphorically, the act of making is captured and preserved in a modern day equivalent of amber.

The equation, however, is a bit more complicated in the way different moments of time exist in a single frame. Liu likens the process to collaborating with herself in a jazz-like manner: the base image is the melody—the improvisation occurs on top of that. A vital new medium emerges from the accumulated strata of old and new marks. Salgado, who worked closely with Liu on these works, aptly equates the series to “exploded drawings.” The different layers literally take on a dimension, and while encased in what seems like flat space, each stratum sits above the next. The base marks may still be below the top surface, but are subtly visible through the layers of resin.

The series physically emerges from the facilities of a fine art press, yet the elements of printmaking are physically pushed into an expanded field. Rather than oils, Liu uses printer’s inks which have a thick paint-like viscosity when used directly from the can. The pigments, however, are more primary and their intensity a few notches higher on the spectrum. She’s inclined to use this pure color to create gestural circles that appear throughout this body of work. The shapes add a dash of almost fluorescent Pop, an appealing addition to Liu’s stylistic repertoire.

ZA ZHONG: BASTARD PAINTINGS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSThis exhibition was made possible through the generosity of donors to the Fresh Art Fund. Additional support was provided by members of the di Rosa Collectors Council and Onward! Young Collectors. Art works in this exhibition were loaned courtesy of Trillium Graphics of Brisbane, California and Hung Liu. Acknowledgements are also due to the staff and volunteers who worked on this exhibition.Opening Reception sponsors: Hess Collection and Winery Chefs. Arts in April Program Partner: Patz & Hall.

cover image: Enmity, mixed media and gold leaf on panel, 2012; inside image: Cycle, mixed media and gold leaf on panel, 2012

Prints are so often associated with the porous qual-ity of paper. These works are alluringly slick and shiny, not so different from the almost reflective surfaces of Asian lacquerware and porcelain (and of course, glossy photographs). The surface is the antithesis of matte, tactile canvas, which provides resistance to what’s applied to it. Here the smooth-ness cooperates and the color skates across the surface; the marks seem to float. It’s worth noting that concurrent with the Bastard Paintings, Liu also created Going Away, Coming Home, a large-scale work on glass, a commission for the Oakland Inter-national Airport, where she was also able to engage with that sense of glide and dynamic possibilities of applying color to clear materials.

Being able to see through the surface of the Bastard works is conceptually and visually rewarding. At times the pieces seem transparent, at others more mutedly translucent. Light responds to the resin in myriad ways. It bounces, and reflects, is trapped, and sometimes transmitted. This has its own ef-fects on dimensionality. From some angles, the works seem flat, but from others, the layered sense of depth is revealed.

The real revelation, however, is the way these works expose and deepened Liu’s process, her history. What artist hasn’t had complicated feelings of pride and regret at seeing a completed piece? “Art is never finished, only abandoned,” Leonardo

da Vinci reportedly said. The Bastard paintings provide a rare opportunity for the artist to revisit her “abandoned” creations. Liu has been deeply engaged with her practice long enough for there to be a rich lode of material to contemplate, and an ever-expanding range of painterly skills to add to past visions. In this series she recaptures a moment of closure, using the position of hindsight to rectify, or perhaps challenge, any second thoughts. Could that first version have been done better? An artist’s history is never exactly fixed; it is constantly open to interpretation by the maker, and her viewers. Liu’s Bastard Paintings make that provocative fact endlessly visible.

Glen Helfand

ABOUT THE AUTHORGlen Helfand is an independent writer, critic, curator and educator based in San Francisco. His writing appears regularly in Artforum, Art on Paper, San Francisco Bay Guardian and many other publications. He teaches in art programs at Mills College, San Francisco Art Institute and California College of the Arts. He has organized ex-hibititions for the de Young Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, Pasadena Museum of Art, Rena Bransten Gallery, and Mills College Art Museum.

This essay was used with the author’s permission from Hung Liu: ZZ (Bastard Painting), copyright 2007, Nancy Hoffman Gallery and Hung Liu.