In August, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., opened HUNG LIU: PORTRAITS OF PROMISED LANDS.  An immigrant herself, the Chinese American artist Hung Liu is best-known for creating large-scale portraits that transform refugees and other marginalized figures into “dignified, even mythic figures on the grand scale of history painting” (Hung Liu quote). Dorothy Moss, the museum’s Curator of Painting and Sculpture, worked with Liu for the past three years to develop this exhibition. “We spoke at length about her engagement of history through her use of photographic archives,” Moss told me, explaining that Liu used photographic images “to create portraiture that positions ‘history as a verb.'” The artist believed her art was a way to connect past with present — to use the constant flow of history to create a visual narrative about how “things of the spirit stay with us much longer than things of the past” (Hung Liu quote).

Liu was born in Changchun, China in 1948. With the rise of Mao, her  family of professionals fled to Beijing, but they were captured by the Red Guard and forced to undergo “reeducation.” Her father, a soldier in the anti-Communist Nationalist Army, was sent to a labor camp, while Hung, in her early 20s, spent four years working in rice and wheat fields to demonstrate her commitment to the Cultural Revolution. She was allowed to attend college in Beijing, and in the 1970s learned mural painting under the strictures of Socialist Realism. In 1984 she received permission to immigrate to the United States, where she enrolled at the University of California-San Diego.

 
Slowly, Liu discovered her creative purpose. One important facet she learned in San Diego was that art had performative possibilities– that she could make her art come alive by injecting it with a sense of theater. As curator Moss told me, Liu’s sense of theatricality is apparent in how she shaped her large canvasses so that you could sense them pulling you into their space.  The viewer, Moss said, can almost “feel an embrace.” Liu wanted people to react. 

Following a return trip to China in 1991, Liu continued to develop her style.  In China, she had discovered a cache of 19th and early 20th century commerical photographs that depicted anonymous, displaced women sitting in formal poses—-child street acrobats, orphans, women laborers, war refugees, and prostitutes. She felt a connection between these anonymous ‘others’ and her own life experience as a refugee, and began incorporating their historic images into her paintings.  In many of her portraits, she also included symbols drawn from traditional Chinese paintings, such as circles that convey “beginnings” and butterflies and cranes that suggest “hope.” Liu had found her artistic purpose—–to give presence to “others” who had been left out of history’s storytelling.

She adopted the use of large-scale photographs as a path to “activate memory” that connected the present with past lives.  Liu applied layers of color to the  large black and white photographs of her subjects, then topped these portraits with linseed oil–a process that limned her paintings with shimmering veils she described as “weeping realism.” 

In the exhibition’s introductory corridor, we are introduced to Liu through the historical context of her early career. She trained at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, where she painted murals in the prescribed Social Realist style. But even there, her creativity burst forth. Because the murals were large, she was able to quietly include imagery she had found while exploring Chinese cave murals and religious shrines. 

Family portraits are the focus of early galleries, and show how Liu used photographs of several generations of her family to “summon their ghosts” into the present. “The Botanist” portrays her maternal grandfather surrounded by plants, while “Father’s Day” is an image of Liu reuniting with her long-lost father in 1994. She had searched for him for decades, and finally found him on a rural work farm. But after a lifetime of hardship, her father was unable to express any joy at their reunion.  “Resident Alien” depicts a giant version of Liu’s Green Card, where she lists her birth date as “1984”—the year she immigrated to the United States.

Overall, “Portraits of Promised Lands” illuminates Liu’s artistic pilgrimage of discovery–an intensely personal journey in which she connected with “spirit-ghosts…as if I could feel the subject’s heartbeat and pulse.”

In later images, Liu reaches out to portray the ‘otherness’ of anonymous people. Notably, women become her primary focus as she embraces a feminist compatibility with strong and hardened women of the past. “Madonna” is a portrait derived from a 19th century photograph of a prostitute holding a child. The setting is remarkably formal, and Liu layers the woman and child’s image with religious intention, emphatically adding a gold portico/halo above them.  “Goddess of Love, Goddess of Liberty” begins with a rare photograph of a woman with her feet unbound. Facing this woman is a photograph of women physically “contained” forever on a porcelain cup. The message Liu is visually narrating is that women have survived and persevered despite the constraints life imposes upon them.

One of the most visually stunning of Liu’s portraits is “Chinese Profile II.”   Here, Liu uses a photograph taken in 1898 by Scottish ethnographer John Thomson, who was documenting Chinese people as evidence to support Social Darwinian ideas about the phrenological implications of racial hierarchy.  She then transforms Thomson’s stereotypic profile into a portrait of a woman who exudes dignity and strength.

Liu believed that her portraits summoned ghosts of the past, whether rooted in her own family history or in such historic photographs as those taken by Dorothea Lange for the Farm Services Administration during the Depression. Like Lange, Liu believed in photography-as-protest, and in “Migrant Mother: Mealtime,” she portrays the determination chiseled in a mother’s weathered face as she struggles to survive—a strength of spirit Liu identified with herself.

The Portrait Gallery has acquired two of her 2020 self-portraits. Both are part of the “Rat Year” series Liu had begun in 2008 to portray herself in years that were “hers” according to the Chinese zodiac calendar. Having these paintings acquired for the museum’s permanent collection was the artist’s final wish, as she suddenly died a month before her NPG exhibition opened this past August.

 
One of the self-portraits is composed of 108 Chinese characters aligned in a loose grid pattern to show the evolution of the “Zheng” character:  Zheng dates at least to 3,500 years BCE, and one of its meanings signifies passing through barriers to reach justice.  The second self-portrait is Liu’s last painting: she depicts herself wearing a mask, our common face covering in Covid times. But Liu’s “mask” is actually the nearly unpainted linen beneath the picture itself. She was implying her vulnerability by showing how she lacked any real covering at all.

Overall, “Portraits of Promised Lands” illuminates Liu’s artistic pilgrimage of discovery–an intensely personal journey in which she connected with “spirit-ghosts…as if I could feel the subject’s heartbeat and pulse.”  Curator Dorothy Moss (left: Moss with the artist in 2018. Photo credit: Jeff Kelly, 2018) has carefully translated Liu’s sense of purpose, and their collaboration has gifted us with an extraordinary exhibition that serves as a grand finale to Liu’s artistic journey. Though she died of pancreatic cancer a month before the exhibition opened (August 7, 2021), Liu was able to meet with Moss in her final days. The curator gave the artist a virtual tour of the exhibition so that Liu could see her retrospective happening virtually onscreen—an ethereal platform where spirit-ghosts live happily.

In a tribute to Hung Liu, San Francisco poet Keith Yamashita wrote:

“She paints the deep and glorious,

That yearns to break

And cry out

That we are somebody’s someone

And that we are human in our hope

and stubborn in our being.”

By Amy Henderson, Contributing Editor
                                                                           
HUNG LIU: PORTRAITS OF PROMISED LANDS  will be at the National Portrait Gallery through May 30, 2022.   The catalogue (left) is authored by curator, Dorothy Moss. See  www.npg.si.edu.