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The Art of Hung Liu: children’s art program on nation - Summoning Ghosts al television, and as a result, she became a TV personality. In the Edited by Amy Teschner, essays by Wu meantime, Deng Xiaoping had Hung, Karen Smith, et al. taken over the reins of govern - University of California Press, 2013 ment on the death of and instituted more moderate Reviewed by Midori Yamamura economic and social policies. Liu entered the graduate program at ung Liu is known for her ’s Central Academy of Fine provocative paintings based on Arts—the apex of the Chinese art HChinese archival and recent world—and was retained as a fac - photographs, with subjects ranging ulty member there to teach mural from prostitutes and exploited laborers, painting. to children of the Revolution and inti - What the book does not make mate family snapshots, and The Art of clear is that, despite her family’s Hung Liu: Summoning Ghosts is the cata - background (her father, Xia Peng, logue for the artist’s much-anticipated a captain in the Fig. 1. Hung Liu, Western Pass (1990), oil on canvas, second major U.S. retrospective at the army, was sent to a labor camp by silver leaf on wood, ceramics, 60” x 60” x 10”. Oakland Museum of California. “By the Communist government the Collection of Hung Liu and Jeff Kelley. turning old photographs into new paint - year Liu was born, and her ings, Liu brings her subjects out of the mother, Liu Zong Guang, was shadows of history into contemporary forced to divorce him), Liu’s family was than biographical, learning about her consciousness” (199), is how Jeff Kelley, relatively untouched by the anti- unique worldview derived from her Liu’s husband and collaborator for the bourgeois purge during the Cultural singular socio-cultural experience in her past thirty years, explains her practice in Revolution. This was likely due to Liu’s own words would deepen our the book’s chronology. In the spirit of impeccable academic performance. understanding of her work. the literati tradition, Liu references Nevertheless, her fear of Nevertheless, this is a handsomely images from the past, of sufferings, authoritarianism was quite deep, and illustrated book, with140 photographs, hardship, and chaotic turmoil, while only after she emigrated to the United and editor Amy Teschner has assembled commenting on the “universal themes States and after she located her father several informative texts. Among them, of repression and gender based power.” 1 and had him released in 1995 did she Wu Hung’s essay, “Four Moments in Given how her artworks made after her fully realize how the Chinese Hung Liu’s Art,” is especially helpful in immigration to the United States in 1984 government had programmed her like a contextualizing Liu’s work. The foremost could be perceived as controversial by puppet. 2 The repercussions of this event authority on Chinese contemporary art, the Chinese Communist government, led Liu to paint a series of happy- Wu focuses on four critical works/ the chronology reveals her surprisingly looking children from Mao Zedong’s exhibitions in Liu’s career, marked by illustrious career in that country. propaganda photographs of the 1950s social events. The first section explains Hung Liu was born in 1948 in and early 1960s, triggered by her how Liu’s largest and most important Changchun, China, to a family that sided memories of growing up under the government-commissioned mural with the Kuomintang, the Chinese Communist government. 3 This group of painting, Music for the Great Earth Nationalist Party. Still, in 1961, Liu was artworks is largely absent from the (1980–81), inspired by the Warring States accepted into the government’s special current catalogue. Moreover, despite bells called bianzhong, was her response boarding school for girls in Beijing, Liu’s unique background, noticeably to the and an where she maintained top grades until absent from the book is a biography attempt to restore human sensibility to the Cultural Revolution erupted in 1966. (excepting Kelley’s chronology), nor is those bereft of all hope. The second As a student of an elite school, Liu was there an interview that might give section focuses on Liu’s new artistic forced to undergo “re-education,” readers added insight into her thinking. identity after graduating from the which, based on Liu’s photographs and Instead, such features are oddly University of California, San Diego, in paintings from the period (61–64, 78–79), replaced by the novelist Yiyun Li’s 1986. Reflecting the 1980s multicultural did not seem to have impacted her. After memoir of growing up under environment of the Bay Area, three completing her “re-education,” she Communist China, which reduces Liu’s interconnected changes occurred that enrolled at the Beijing Teacher’s College, unique experience into a universal type. could be observed in Liu’s threshold and became an art teacher at the As Gayatri Spivak insightfully points exhibition, entitled “Resident Alien” Jingshan School, an elite Beijing school out in her 1988 subaltern study, not all (1988), as part of the artist-in-residence modeled after the Russian system. The subjects of the Other are the same. 4 program at the Capp Street Project. These government also assigned her to teach a Although Liu’s work is more conceptual changes were: the emergence of the

SPRING / SUMMER 2015 47 immigrant as a central theme; Liu’s dimensional wooden square pedestals, and idealized representation, suggest interest in modern and contemporary placing a porcelain bowl on each, and how Liu complied with the government, Chinese politics; and the use of old added lines of poetry. Wu notes that, giving readers an interesting and impor - photographs and other historical “Many of the visual elements in Western tant point of comparison with her later artifacts. Concerning the latter, she was Pass ,” such as the juxtaposition of two- works. interested in images relating to Chinese and three-dimensional images and the Curiously, the book contains no people, particularly those who were past and present, would “continued to discussion of Liu’s feminism. According excluded from the mainstream history. be extended in Liu’s later works” (32). to the chronology, however, she was a Rather than assimilating into U.S. More changes occurred in Liu’s speaker at the 2011 feminist conference culture, Liu explained that she wanted to technique, especially, during the mid- in China, International Conference on contribute to her “new home” by 1990s. She added “ink splash” ( po mo ) to Chinese Women and Visual Representation . expressing her “Cheesiness” (24). her images and symbolically blurred The subjects of Liu’s paintings range It was during this period that she them, as if to signify a process of from the powerful Dowager Empress began conducting social surveys and memory permeating her art. Bill Cixi, to orphaned girls, prostitutes, and archival research into modern and Berkson’s essay, originally written for Korean comfort women, and such contemporary history that became Liu’s 1998 Rena Bransten Gallery scholars as Elaine Kim and Norman pivotal to her practice. It was also exhibition catalogue, elaborates on her Bryson have eloquently written on the during this time that Liu’s “paintings new drip technique as creating an uniqueness of Liu’s feminism. 6 In the and installations began to show anticlimactic disillusion, marking Liu’s present catalogue, the Beijing-based art historical traces in an increasingly shift away from the rigid social realism historian Karen Smith touches on some complex manner; different temporalities that she studied in China. of Liu’s female subjects. She also refers negotiated, interwove, and collided in The last section of Wu’s essay focuses to a 2011 interview in which Liu ever more puzzling ways” (24). Central on Liu’s first solo exhibition in China, discussed wanting to “restore dignity” to this exhibition were three 5’ x 7’6” which coincided with the 2008 Beijing to “the women who have completely Green Card paintings, representing three Olympics. Situated in the Nanxincang lost their freedom, family, and identity” immigrant generations of the Wong granary, the imperial storehouse erected by returning “the male gaze in the more family of San Francisco. Other works in in Beijing during the Ming dynasty, the aggressive, strong, dignified way” (99). the show were paintings of prostitutes show included Liu’s installation made Missing, though, from Smith’s essay, of old Chinatown and of Chinese especially for this venue, titled The Great was how Liu’s female subjects returned laborers in the West who built the Granary. The work consists of thirty-four the male gaze. transcontinental railroad. Such subjects old-style grain measures from the thirty- The Art of Hung Liu: Summoning would reappear in her later works. four provincial administrative divisions Ghosts has much to recommend it, and Overall, this exhibition connected her in China, filled with grains, cereals, and the essays are important contributions experience in the United States with that beans and placed directly on the floor in to scholarship on this artist. However, of other Chinese immigrants within a a pattern roughly resembling an outline given the lack of a feminist lens, a changing historical context. 5 of China. Surrounding The Great Granary biography, and a personal interview, the The third section of Wu’s text focuses were new studies based on Music for the present volume would be best on Trauma, Liu’s response to the Great Earth , her earliest mural painting. complemented by reading Hung Liu: A Tiananmen Square incident in 1989. Two Having started her career as a mural - Ten-Year Survey 1988–1998 , which sections in this work render a map of ist, spatial formation, or installation, was includes Kathleen McManus Zurko’s Beijing centered on Tiananmen Square an important yet lesser-known aspect of extensive interview with Liu, and (left) and a furious officer from the Liu’s oeuvre that she began creating in Trinkett Clark’s essay for Hung Liu: People’s Liberation Army (right). The 1985, a year after her arrival in the Parameters (1996), which discusses Liu’s officer’s pistol is aimed at Liu’s self- United States. Stephanie Hanor’s essay work in relation to her biography. portrait painted directly below. Like chronologically discusses Liu’s site-spe - many other Chinese expatriate artists, cific works, such as Jin Jin Shan (Old Midori Yamamura is a lecturer at the June Fourth incident reconnected Gold Mountain) (1994) and Going Away, Fordham University. She is a specialist Liu with China, spurring her use of Coming Home (2006). Senior Curator of in modern and contemporary Asian art Chinese archival photographs—evoking Oakland Museum René De Guzman’s with a global and transnational focus, memories of herself and her native essay, “Snapshot,” which captures and has written extensively on Japanese country. The first of this series, Western moments of Liu’s life that she knew per - post-World War II art. Her first book, Pass (1990; Fig. 1), is based on the British sonally, as Liu’s studio assistant, is a little Yayoi Kusama: Inventing the Singular , will plant collector E. H. Wilson’s gruesome diffused and argumentatively thin. be published by MIT Press this year. images of criminals waiting for However, De Guzman’s images, espe - Notes execution, taken between 1899 and 1910. cially those of Liu’s oil paintings and of 1. Roslyn Bernstein, “Scholar-Artist: Hung To a faithful depiction of two such photographs from the time of the Liu,” in Hung Liu: The Year of the Dog, tortured criminals, Liu added two three- Cultural Revolution, with their idyllic 1994, exh. cat. (New York: Steinbaum

48 WOMAN’S ART JOURNAL Krauss Gallery, 1994), 6. Although Liu was 4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the 6. Elaine H. Kim, “Bad Women: Asian not aware of literati until she came to the Subaltern Speak?,” in Patrick Williams and American Visual Artists Hanh Thi Pham, United States due to the Cultural Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse Hung Liu, and Yong Soon Min,” Feminist Revolution; Trinkett Clark, Hung Liu: and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader (New Studies 22 (1996): 507–603; Norman Parameters , exh. brochure (Norfolk, VA: The York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994), 66–111. Bryson, “Hung Liu’s Goddess,” in Hung Chrysler Museum of Art, and Oakland, CA: 5. For more on these images, see for Liu: A Ten-Year Survey, 1988–1998, ed., Mills College Art Gallery, 1996), n.p. example, Allison Arieff, “Cultural Kathleen McManus Zurko, exh. cat. 2. Clark, Hung Liu: Parameters , n.p. Collisions: Identity and History in the Work (Wooster, OH: College of Wooster Art Museum, 1998), 17–26. 3. Ibid. of Hung Liu,” WAJ 17, no. 1(Spring- Summer 1996): 35–40.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: For the artist, color and sub - An American Modernist ject matter are directly connect - ed, a topic Kastner explores in By Carolyn Kastner her second chapter, “Seeing University of New Mexico Press, 2013 Red: Indigenous Identity and Artistic Strategy.” In addition to Reviewed by Betsy Fahlman it being a primary color and thus deeply grounded in the his - arolyn Kastner’s Jaune Quick-to- tory of painting, red also See Smith: An American Modernist references racial identity, blood, Cis a concise monograph on an and anger. Kastner deftly decon - important artist, curator, and political structs The Red Mean: Self- activist. Kastner’s beautifully written Portrait (1992; Fig. 1), explicating and richly textured analysis is a model how Smith’s use of red signals of literate, insightful scholarship. Five “affirmation and resist-ance” thematic chapters each focus on a (23). specific body of work. Acknowledging “American Modernism and Smith’s particular vantage on the the Politics of Landscape,” “racialized discourse of American chapter three, locates Smith’s history” (1), Kastner places the artist’s work within the broad history oeuvre and practice within a broad of American painting, revealing historical, social, and contemporary her “personal sense of place and context, demonstrating how her use of connection to the land of North “dense sign systems” (2) enables the America.” (27) The artist’s artist to deliver “complex messages” (3) sources are imaginatively Fig. 1. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, The Red Mean: Self- referencing her identity as a Native diverse and include Thomas Portrait (1992), acrylic, newspaper collage, shellac, and American modernist. Cole, Georgia O’Keeffe, and mixed media on canvas, 90” x 60”. Smith College In her first chapter, “Born in the Willem de Kooning, although, Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusets. USA,” Kastner considers Smith’s writes Kastner, she recasts “the multiple inspirations, discussing how American landscape as a site of the artist has drawn on a broad range of cultural conflict,” visualizing “an series of explicitly political art works” influences to “enrich, resist, or indigenous viewpoint about land” (27). which have intriguing parallels to confound” meaning (3). By deriving The works discussed here are vigorous Robert Rauschenberg and Jean-Michel- “imagery and color from the natural and painterly, informed by a Basquiat (4). Passionately political, and world and diverse cultures of North breathtaking and densely expressive referencing oil spills, acid rain, and America” (7), Smith’s experience is abstraction richly resonant with drought, these intense works “resist the grounded in a “fragmented and “multiple and colliding cultural signs” idyllic, yet resonate with poetic complex” hybridity as a result of “being (31) that Smith uses to “denounce the metaphor” (42). Each piece contains female, indigenous, urban, and a damage to the place and the people who words from Chief Seattle’s 1854 speech resident of the United States” (9). Born hold the site sacred” (29). when “he surrendered his people and in Montana in 1940, and based in New In “Chief Seattle: Visualizing land” to federal control (41). Mexico since 1976, she has been inspired Environmental Disaster,” the fourth In her last chapter, “The Discourse of by nature: “My life’s work involves chapter, Kastner explores how Smith Modern Art in a Post-Columbian World,” examining contemporary life in “adapted the gritty urban styles of Kastner discusses the thirteen watercol - America and interpreting it through American pop and graffiti art to invoke ors of paper dolls Smith created during Native ideology” (15). the threat of environmental ruin in a the 1992 Columbian quincentennial in

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