Lecture: Tuesday, February 21, 2017 7:00 – 8:30pm
Location: The CIA at Copia Theater, 500 First Street, Napa CA
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.
Known for paintings based on historical Chinese photographs, Hung Liu’s subjects over the years have been prostitutes, refugees, street performers, soldiers, laborers, and prisoners, among others. As a painter, Liu challenges the documentary authority of historical Chinese photographs by subjecting them to the more reflective process of painting. Much of the meaning of Liu’s painting comes from the way the washes and drips dissolve the documentary images, suggesting the passage of memory into history, while working to uncover the cultural and personal narratives fixed – but often concealed – in the photographic instant. 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.
A two time recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in painting, Liu also received a Lifetime Achievement Award in Printmaking from the Southern Graphics Council International in 2011. A retrospective of Liu’s work, “Summoning Ghosts: The Art and Life of Hung Liu,” was recently organized by the Oakland Museum of California, and is scheduled to tour nationally through 2015. In a review of that show, the Wall Street Journal called Liu “the greatest Chinese painter in the US.” 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. She is Professor Emerita at Mills College, where she has taught since 1990.
Jeff Kelley lives in Oakland, California. A practicing art critic since 1977, he has written reviews and essays for such publications as Artforum, Art in America, and the Los Angeles Times. From 1993 – 2005 he taught Art Theory and Criticism at the University of California, Berkeley, and edited/authored two books on Allan Kaprow published by the University of California Press. Kelley was also the Consulting Curator of Contemporary Art at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco from 1998 – 2008, where he developed the museum’s contemporary exhibitions and publications programs, organizing exhibitions by Chinese artists Sui Jianguo (“The Sleep of Reason,” 2005), Liu Xiaodong (“The Three Gorges Project,” 2006), and Zhan Wang (“On Gold Mountain: Sculpture from the Sierra,” 2008). In addition, Kelley curated the popular and critically acclaimed "Half-Life of a Dream: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Logan Collection" for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2008), and currently functions as an advisor on Chinese art to the Logan Collection. He is presently editing a book, for the University of California Press, of the writings of internationally known Chinese artist and architect Ai Weiwei.
