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Interview a Conversation with Hung Hung Liu, The Ocean is the Dragon’s World, 1995. Oil on canvas, painted wood panel, metal support rod, and metal birdcage with wood and ceramic appendages, 97 x 82 1/2 x 17 5/8 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase in part through the Lichtenberg Family Foundation This content downloaded from 076.127.009.092 on February 07, 2018 13:22:21 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Interview A Conversation with Hung Liu Joann Moser Hung Liu is a leading figure in the con- Hung Liu was born in 1948 in temporary art world, in both the United Changchun, China, which was the capital States and China. A resident of the city for the Japanese puppet dynasty of United States since 1984, she has created the exiled Emperor Pu Yi. Her father was imagery that often draws on historic a captain in the Nationalist Army (the photographs, traditional Chinese paint- Kuomintang) of Chiang Kai-shek and ing, and her memories and experiences as was arrested, when Liu was an infant, by an artist growing up in China during the Communist forces as the family fled the era of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. city looking for food. After Changchun In her work, Liu continues to consider fell to the Communists, she returned Chinese traditions and symbolism as well with her remaining family. At age eleven, as the lives of immigrants to this country. she impulsively accompanied her aunt Her training in the socialist realist style of to Beijing, where they survived the mass painting is apparent, but the drips, circles, famine resulting from Mao Zedong’s and symbols that overlay her figures Great Leap Forward. Liu was sent to the introduce counterpoint and complexity countryside when she was twenty years to the images. Her handling of space and old for proletarian “reeducation” during dramatic juxtapositions of scale and form the Cultural Revolution. She completed invigorate her paintings, drawings, and school and began to teach art at an elite prints with the vitality and immediacy of school in Beijing. After several years, she contemporary expression. attended the Central Academy of Fine Because of the prevalence of female Arts, the leading art graduate school in figures in her work, both historic and China, majoring in mural painting; she contemporary, Hung Liu has sometimes began teaching there in 1981. been claimed as a feminist artist. She In 1984, after waiting for four years, has expressed some affinity with this Hung Liu received permission to leave movement, but a lack of comfort with its China for the United States and has lived limitations. Instead, she talks most often here ever since. After studying at the about her work as a reaction against and Visual Arts Department at the University a transformation of the socialist realist of California, San Diego, she began teach- tradition. She seeks both to preserve and ing art at the University of North Texas, to destroy the image, to find meaning in Denton, in 1989, and the following year the past for the present. at Mills College in Oakland, California, 77 American Art Volume 25, Number 2 © 2011 Smithsonian Institution This content downloaded from 076.127.009.092 on February 07, 2018 13:22:21 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 1 Hung Liu in her Oakland, California, studio with paintings, 2010. Photo, Joann Moser where she remains on the faculty. In sixty-three, for two and a half days in 1991 she became an American citizen 2010 to conduct an oral history inter- and returned to China for the first time. view for the Archives of American Art, She has maintained close ties to China Smithsonian Institution, in her Oakland, through visits, friends, fellow artists, and California, studio (fig. 1). Surrounded by daily telephone calls to her mother until her current work and personal memora- her mother’s death in September 2010. bilia, we discussed a broad range of topics. She has exhibited actively both in The following transcript represents a selec- China and the United States, from tive and edited version of that expansive San Francisco to Miami, Los Angeles interview. to New York, Santa Fe to Ketchum, Idaho; Kansas City; and Baltimore. In JM: Do you remember when you became a recent article in the New York Times interested in art for the first time? You (January 20, 2011) on contemporary were just a small child in Manchuria. Chinese women artists, the author cites Hung Liu as an outstanding Chinese HL: I was always interested in art, maybe American artist whose work is now because my grandfather had a collection in the permanent collections of the of painting and calligraphy, and a collec- Whitney Museum of American Art, the tion of postage stamps. Whenever he had Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the time, he opened his treasure cabinet and Smithsonian American Art Museum started carefully, sometimes with little and the National Gallery of Art in tweezers, to handle the stamps. I always Washington, D.C., among many other watched. And when I had a piece of chalk notable institutions. or something, I drew things on the floor, I met with Hung Liu, a vibrant and on the wall, and if some friends visited, welcoming woman who has just turned I made their portraits. They said I was 78 Summer 2011 This content downloaded from 076.127.009.092 on February 07, 2018 13:22:21 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). really good, that I could capture their long hair, like those little melancholy special features (fig. 2). artists—very clichéd. I joined that club and we did whatever—still life, portrai- Later your grandparents and mother ture, landscape, anything. By the time joined you in Beijing. You all lived with I graduated, I said, “I really love art.” your aunt and uncle, and you had to But my mom, my family, everybody, adapt at school. said, “Art? It’s not a serious career. You can always do art in your spare time. When I first got to Beijing, I was like a The serious jobs are like doctors, engi- stranger from another part of the country; neers—for a girl, it’s very good to study even my accent from Manchuria was dif- medicine.” I thought, fine. I want to ferent. I needed to relearn, to catch up. save people’s lives; I can be a surgeon. Eventually I was a very good, top student During that time, the majority of stu- in everything. When we reached gradu- dents studied Russian because of the ation, we had to take a civil exam and relationship with the Soviet Union—we fill out our wish list for schools. My first called it our “big brother.” But my mom choice was a girls’ middle school attached encouraged me to study English. She to Beijing Normal University. It was the said English was more universal. I was best school in the country, a boarding working on a big exam to enter medical school. Mao Zedong’s daughter went school in 1966 when the Cultural there, Deng Xiaoping’s daughters. When I Revolution happened. Two years later, got an acceptance letter, I couldn’t believe my generation, even younger and older it. The myth is, the moment you walk into people, we were all sent to the country- that school it’s guaranteed that when you side or military farms. I worked in the graduate you will go to the best university. fields for almost four years. My best friend, who now lives in New Jersey, went with me to that same school. How did events unfold? Did you have any exposure to art in When the Cultural Revolution started, school at this point, or did that come nobody realized the magnitude of it. Then later? one day, in the People’s Daily, which is the party’s paper, there was an article criticiz- When I got to this girls’ school, we ing so-and-so—a Peking opera play, you had an art club taught by our art class know. We didn’t take it seriously. But this teacher. He always wore a scarf, with opera was about an official in the Ming dynasty who dared to speak out on behalf of the people to the emperor: “People are suffering. It is not right.” Mao Zedong got angry at this. He was always paranoid that the people, especially the intellectuals—writers, musicians, artists—would use metaphors, ancient fables, and folklore to attack the party. That is how it started. 2 Hung Liu, childhood drawing, We were preparing to enter 1953. Photo, courtesy of the college, and then school artist was interrupted, classes 79 American Art This content downloaded from 076.127.009.092 on February 07, 2018 13:22:21 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). were canceled. And the Dazibao—the And they were all tough on the stage: big-character posters that were every- “So-and-so used to be the teacher, you where—targeted all the leaders [of respected the teacher, the teacher had the the school], like the school principal, podium,” but now it was, “So-and-so, superintendent, and the dean, criticiz- come over here!” We watched this verbal ing them for promoting nonproletarian and physical criticism of the teachers.
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