Art as a Universal Language: Hung Liu’s Revolutionary Feminism

Hung Liu’s impact on contemporary art is immense. Since the Chinese government’s censorship of her 2019 Beijing exhibition, her Smithsonian retrospective in 2021, and her passing that same year, the international art world is anticipating the next deep dive into Liu’s work. Turner Carroll Gallery is proud to present Hung Liu: Memory and Revolution, an exhibition offering a glimpse into Liu’s deep sense of humanism and her revolutionary feminism. The exhibition features selections from the gallery’s own collection of her most significant works, as well as iconic works curated from private collections.

The exhibition is notable in that it features major paintings spanning Liu’s earliest years as an immigrant from China, as well as her her shaped canvases, and paintings including three dimensional objects such as Musicians (above), and a major painting from her landmark feminist series, Daughters of China (top).

Most of the works in this exhibition have not been publicly exhibited in recent years, so the exhibition offers a unique opportunity to view Hung Liu through a new lens. Turner Carroll’s Hung Liu: Memory and Revolution runs simultaneous to SFMoMA’s exhibition Hung Liu: Witness, and in advance of The National Museum of Women in the Arts’ exhibition of Liu’s works for its grand reopening this fall. 

Much of Liu’s impressive body of work reflects the widely-shared experience of immigrating to a new culture. Born in northern China in a time of famine, her first migration was as a six-month-old child in her mother’s arms during her family’s fleeing famine in Changchun, known colloquially as “the city of bones.”

While visions of travel and immigration in popular culture typically skew romantic, Hung Liu’s work reflects the realities of displacement, including the internal conflicts and loss of identity that often result from leaving home. Her 2004 work Travelogue (above) is an acknowledgment of our culture’s idealization of immigration, its title referencing the concept of a travel diary, a common narrative theme in movies and books.

Liu’s life in China was a tumultuous one. The daughter of scholars and a member of the Nationalist Army, her father was taken away to a labor camp from the time she was a baby until his death. She saw him only once as an adult when she was fifty years old, shortly before his death. To avoid retaliation by the government, her family destroyed photographs that included her father. Liu’s lack of photos documenting her own family was foundational in her reverence for historic photographs as the inspiration for paintings throughout her career.

When Hung Liu was a youth, she was removed from school and sent to the Chinese countryside to labor as part of her “re-education” during the Cultural Revolution. The small image in the viewer’s left panel of the Golden Lotus, Red Flag diptych is a painted version of one of Liu’s few photographs of her young self. Carrying a gun, standing in the fields, this image served as an aspirational image for Liu, showing the social justice warrior she would become.

In contrast to the warrior panel in Golden Lotus, Red Flag, the other panel of the diptych depicts a woman whose feet had been bound. A common practice in historic China, foot binding essentially hobbled the woman to the extent that they had no ability to move quickly to defend themselves or to escape aggression. While the revolutionary ballerinas in the left panel might seem strong, their feet were bound in another way. Liu once told Tonya Turner Carroll that while the ballerinas looked like “modern” women, their toe shoes hobbled them and limited their movement similar to foot binding. Liu presented her opinion that even though China seemed to be offering “modernization” to women, there were still gender handicaps placed upon even the most “modernized.”

Hung Liu told us that when she was working in the fields of China during the Cultural Revolution, she saw an airplane cross the sky. She wondered where they people on the airplane were going, and she determined that one day, she would take such an airplane to go to the United States. In fact, she did. Her first flight was all the way to San Diego, where she was one of the first Chinese graduate students in an American MFA program. There, she was thrown into a radically different art world. Instead of Socialist Realist painting style, her radical instructor Allan Kaprow (creator of Happenings) expected her to break through artistic norms and create an original visual language for herself.

Laundry Lady, 1995, oil on shaped canvas, 72 x 38″ image courtesy Turner Carroll Gallery, ©Hung Liu Estate/ARS, NY

Liu came to the U.S. in 1984 with the expectation that women would occupy a better social position than they did in China. She found that Chinese immigrants were instead often marginalized in American culture, expected to occupy certain roles and do certain jobs such as working in laundromats or restaurants. This realization is reflected in works such as Laundry Lady, which shows a Chinese woman seated in front of a laundromat, placed in an occupation that was stereotypical for the subject’s intersectional status as both a woman and a person of Asian descent. 

Comrade in Arms is a monumental painting depicting a topic that was monumental to Hung Liu—the bravery and heroism of the women who stood by each other during wars in the China of her childhood. As is the case with all of Liu’s paintings, this composition uses a historic photograph as its inspiration. Liu notes, “This interweaving of images from the ancient and modern past continues my interest in a contemporary form of history painting in which the subjects from one era witness and comment upon those of another, keeping the idea of history open and fluid.” Comrade in Arms is an exquisite example of the best attributes of Liu’s artistic style: powerful gesture, weeping realism consisting of drips and poignant historic subject matter, and transcendent beauty.

In this work, two women support their wounded comrade, embodying an eloquent double entendre of “arms” as vehicle for both war and harm as well as nurturing.

Comrade in Arms is a monumental painting depicting a topic that was monumental to Hung Liu—the bravery and heroism of the women who stood by each other during wars in the China of her childhood. As is the case with all of Liu’s paintings, this composition uses a historic photograph as its inspiration. Liu notes, “This interweaving of images from the ancient and modern past continues my interest in a contemporary form of history painting in which the subjects from one era witness and comment upon those of another, keeping the idea of history open and fluid.” Comrade in Arms is an exquisite example of the best attributes of Liu’s artistic style: powerful gesture, weeping realism consisting of drips and poignant historic subject matter, and transcendent beauty.

In this work, two women support their wounded comrade, embodying an eloquent double entendre of “arms” as vehicle for both war and harm as well as nurturing.