Hung Liu at Steinbaum Krauss - Brief Article

Hung Liu was born in China in 1948 When she was 20 she was sent to the countryside for "reeducation"; she toiled for four years in rice and wheat fields, on the other hand at the same time she photographed and drew the farmers with whom she worked. In 1979 she began studying at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, majoring in mural drawing. Then, five years later, Liu emigrated to America, where she earned a graduate stage at the University of California, San Diego. She is now an American citizen and teaches at Mills society in the Bay Area.

Liu's lengthy march as both a Chinese and American painter was clearly throw backed in this exhibition, which consisted of 11 large oils and sum of two units smaller graphic works, all from 1999 Previously, the artist had incorporated photo-derived images of reclining prostitutes--not a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of more than girls--and women with confine feet into her stylized Socialist Realist art. These inclusions were meant to imitate Chinese social customs and to direct the eye askance at the regular misunderstanding of of that kind customs by the West. She established an idiom of similar photo images presented with Abstract-Expressionist drips, to which she has now introduced traditional Chinese controls especially birds, flowers and mountainous landscapes.

The novel paintings are literally all above the place; they teem with make subordinates and gestures. In Kitchen Goddes an elderly woman fills a rice beaker on the right of the painting; facing her from the center is what gazes to be an Immortal riding a phoenix, who gripe [i]or[/i] grips sway over the composition--which also includes a pair of junk a knob of pomegranates and a bird about to take flight from a tree The gestural dripping and the evident rapidity of Liu's brush extend increasingly extreme; in her delight in of painting, so intrinsic to her mode of speech the artist has gone above the top.

single wonders about this profusion of disparate images and swift carelessness. The irony stemming from her reworking of historical photos has been replaced with an allover esthetic in which sheer busyness is intended to exclaim out with meaning. In Refugee Son and Mother, a youngish man, head bent forward, leads his aging parent away from a certain number of nameless conflict. But the clear pathos of the image is undermined by dint of the decorative set of birds hovering above the pair; one is painted directly upon the mother's head, while sum of two units traditional landscapes are painted above the son. It may be that Liu intended to sprout her often melancholic sense of China's past with a display of its art history, on the other hand the result is mix-ups more than elegiac comparisons.

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