‘I Carried My Ghosts With Me’: The Art Of Hung Liu Continues To Haunt And Inspire After Her Death
Hung Liu
An installation of 1,000 felt cut-outs of Mao Zedong’s profile, titled Where Is Mao? A splayed eagle was slain by hunters that represents the Chinese government’s treatment of Tibet. A mountain of 200,000 golden fortune cookies laid on railroad tracks, which wrestles with the complicated legacy of Chinese immigration to California during the Gold Rush. Though much of Hung Liu’s art may be interpreted as explicit political commentary, the late Chinese American artist repeatedly insisted that her work was a vehicle for expressing the dignity of her subjects – not her personal agenda.
“My work is not really edgy or overly political. It just bears witness to history and humanity,” said Liu in a 2019 interview with The San Francisco Chronicle.
Lauded as “the greatest Chinese painter in the U.S.” by The Wall Street Journal, Liu died in August at 73 of pancreatic cancer, shortly before her exhibition Portraits of Promised Lands was scheduled to debut at the National Portrait Gallery. The now posthumous exhibit, which is currently in progress, made history this year as the Gallery’s first show by an Asian American woman.
"Hung is one of those artists that was breaking those barriers so that people like me [artists of color] can be represented for what we do," said artist and Liu’s friend Mildred Howard in an interview with NPR. "She was one of the artists that helped us to get a place at the table."
Liu, who referred to her work as the art of “summoning ghosts,” was also haunted throughout her life by the displacement and political exile that plagued her early childhood. In 1948, the year Liu was born, her family fled their hometown of Changchun, China to escape starvation. Her father, a captain in the Nationalist Army (or Kuomintang), was detained en route by Communist troops and remained a prisoner in labor camps until his reunion with Liu in 1994.
Later, Liu endured back-breaking adolescence as part of Mao Zedong’s “proletarian re-education” program, which forced urban intellectuals into the countryside to experience life as peasant farm laborers. It was in this same countryside that Liu first cultivated an interest in portraiture and documenting the lives of working-class people: during her four years as a rice and wheat field worker, she photographed and sketched local farmers and their families. In 1984, she emigrated to the United States to study art at the University of California San Diego and ultimately settled in San Francisco.
“When I moved to the West, exactly half a lifetime ago, I carried my ghosts with me,” wrote Liu in the opening to Ghosts/Seventy Portraits, a 2020 collection of her work. Inspired by both her training in Socialist Realism, a form of realist propaganda art originating in the Soviet Union, and the documentary photography of Dorothea Lange, Liu experimented with painting and photography to forge a new style that she dubbed “weeping realism.” She is best known for breathing new life into photographs of history’s forgotten “ghosts” – refugees, prisoners, peasants, sex workers – by turning them into paintings that she douses in linseed oil, imbuing pictures from the past with a lacquered movement that appears to rain across the canvas.
Given her history of making waves, it may come as no surprise that Liu eventually courted controversy in the art world. In 2019, Chinese authorities pulled Liu’s debut exhibition at a Beijing museum due to concerns about the “politically inflammatory” nature of her work, including a painting of schoolgirls wearing gas masks that some believe evoked the 2019 Hong Kong protests. Liu maintained that her primary intent as an artist was to document, not to provoke. “Of course my work has political dimensions, but my focus is really the human faces, the human struggle, the epic journey,” said Liu in an interview with The New York Times. “Chinese contemporary art over the past 25 years has reflected an opening up of speech in China, and a meaningful dialogue with the world,” she continued. “That openness is now beginning to feel like a dream.”
But the political critique implicit in Liu’s work isn’t just confined to China; notably, Liu also grappled with the tensions of diaspora and the uncertainties of her American identity in works like Resident Alien, which depicts a mural-sized rendering of the artist’s green card. The large-scale painting – which lists her name simply as Cookie, Fortune – speaks volumes about the demands and erasures of assimilation in America. “China is my homeland. An American is something I’m always becoming – it’s a verb,” said Hung Liu in a lecture to students at Chulalongkorn University in 2000.
In 2021, the United States witnessed a national spike in anti-Asian incidents, including the Atlanta spa shootings that specifically targeted Asian American and Pacific Islander women in March. In the context of these attacks, which according to the Associated Press reached 9,000 in August, Liu’s work of bearing witness to the daily lives of immigrants and Asian American and Pacific Islanders appears more urgent than ever. “The ghosts I carry are a burden, but also a blessing,” wrote Liu in Ghosts/Seventy Portraits. Though she spent lifetime summoning ghosts, Liu’s legacy – like her paintings -- is preserved and enlivened by its ongoing connection to the events and lives of the present.