RECLAIMING FEMALE AGENCY

FEMINIST ART HISTORY AFTER POSTMODERNISM

Edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON

22

CULTURAL COLLISIONS

Identity and History in the Work o f Hung Liu

Allison Arieff

DECEPTIVELY SIMPLE, Hung Liu’s paintings ad­ images she appropriates, while at the same time re­ dress such diverse and complex issues as footbinding belling against stringent academic rendering. Forced and Western art-historical tradition. The tension in­ to paint in a Social Realist style in China, she now ea­ herent in her conflicted personal identity as a Chinese- gerly embraces the techniques of collage, installation, born woman artist living in the West informs her art. and assemblage. Liu also mocks traditional Western Liu’s images of women form a cultural critique, si­ portrayals of women by referencing the iconography multaneously referring to and challenging artistic and using the titles of canonical artworks such as her and social traditions of East and West. In basing her Mona Lisa I, Madonna, and La Grande Odalisque. subject matter on Western-influenced photographs of Liu’s paintings can perhaps best be read as alle­ turn-of-the-century Chinese prostitutes, Liu further gories, given their metatextuality: one text is read objectifies representations of women as a basis for through another. She does not invent her imagery but criticizing both the way "we” (Westerners) view Chi­ rather confiscates or appropriates it from other nese culture and the way Chinese culture has looked sources. At times she may even project the photo­ at women. She assumes the diflicult task of critiquing graphic image onto the canvas and paint from there. China’s oppressive patriarchal system, alerting her In her hands, then, the image becomes something audience to past transgressions in the hope that other than it was originally intended to be. Liu’s ma­ knowledge and awareness may serve as an impetus for nipulation of the original images lessens their intent change. and authoritative claim to meaning. By generating Political content notwithstanding, the artist’s images through the reproduction of found photo­ work, as Lisa Corrin points out, “cannot be reduced graphs, Liu alters their significance. The women in to the cliche of an artist longing for democracy.”' her paintings can be viewed as more than objects for Liu’s paintingstyle both reflects and subverts her tra­ the male gaze. Her representation of prostitutes and ditional art training. Her canvases are deliberately concubines and, more recently, Qing Dynasty court flattened and distorted, simulating the photographic figures, allows for new ways of seeing.

This essay was first published in Woman If A n Journal 17, no. i (Spring—Summer 1996): 35—40. Copyright © 1996 Allison Arieff. Reprinted by permission of the author and Woman Ir A n Journal.

Figure 22.1. Hung Liu, Virgin/Vessel, 1990. Oil on canvas. Courtesy Bernice Stembaum Gallery, Miami, Florida.

435 Liu, writes Moira Roth, has “developed more dent and was thus periodically subjected to reeduca­ fully and consciously her presentation of the interplay tion programs aimed at eradicating politically un­ of gazes: European and Chinese, male and female, popular ideas. She never stopped thinking about art, past and present, artist’s and viewer’s.”^ The strug­ though. She made the best of her circumstances, be­ gle between opposing elements is continual. The friending peasants who realized that she and other artist explains, “Sometimes I feel more labeled than girls had been sent to the fields as punishment not for embraced,. . . labeled . . . as a minority artist,. . . an bad behavior but simply for being from the city. Iron­ artist of color, a woman artist (feminist?). . . . I am ically, her forced peasant status worked to her ad­ an artist from China and in China the terms by which vantage. In 1972, toward the end of the Cultural I am defined here make little sense.”^ She compares Revolution, she was able to enter the Revolutionary the process of her work to an excavation where there Entertainment Department at Beijing Teachers Col­ are so many layers that she is still trying to understand lege under a policy that provided education to the and analyze them all. Liu’s move to the United States working class. and the shift in her work from Socialist Realism to So­ As an art student at college, Liu had no creative cial Realism resulted in what she describes as “a cri­ freedom. Under Communist rule, art was not about sis of cultural collision.” Perhaps out of necessity, individual expression or inspiration. The true purpose Liu’s is an art of subversion. She is attempting to in­ of art, according to Mao Tse-tung, was to serve the vent for herself a way to practice as a Chinese artist masses. The “rich legacy and the good traditions” outside of Chinese culture. The shift from her clas­ from China’s past were to be reappropriated for the sical training in Chinese art to contemporary West­ people and transformed into something revolution­ ern art practice has in effect become the subject of her ary. Art has an assigned position in Communist Party work. She challenges and reinterprets existing social politics. Cultural and artistic policy is still set by the and cultural conventions so as to forge her own per­ Department of Propaganda. All art publicly exhib­ sonal and artistic identity. ited or reproduced is required to meet current art pol­ Hung Liu was born in the city of Chang Chung icy standards. “When I was in China,” Liu explains, in northeastern China in 1948. Her father, a military “artists were expected to be the tools of propaganda. officer in the Nationalist army of Chiang Kai-shek, Abstract and individualistic paintings are not accept­ was captured and jailed by the Communists when she able in schools or for public exhibition.”"* was only six months old. Liu’s mother was forced to But Liu drew secretly using a small hidden paint divorce her husband, who had fought on the “wrong box. She was subsequently criticized for paying too side” and was considered the enemy. Liu, an only much attention to art and not enough to politics. Her child, met her father for the first time in 1994. Her first job upon graduation was teaching art at an ex­ mother still lives in China. Liu received most of her perimental school where her young students were in­ education in Beijing. In 1966, when she was just structed how to paint the red flag of Communism. She eighteen and looking forward to college, the Culmral wanted to continue her education, but only classes re­ Revolution began. For years the schools were closed. lated to the revolution were offered. She studied Considered an intellectual because of her high school books on Western and Chinese art history and criti­ education, Liu was sent to a military farm in the coun­ cism on her own, eventually making her eligible to at­ tryside for reeducation. There, with other “intellec­ tend the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. tuals,” a diverse group that ran the gamut from ac­ Once at the academy, Liu wanted to study mural tors to junior high school students, she was forced to painting. Because of its roots in Buddhist and Taoist work in rice, corn, and wheat fields and to take care traditions, mural painting seemed at first to allow for of horses as a means of ridding her of elitist thought. some measure of artistic freedom and individual style. Later, as an artist she was perceived as too indepen­ However, the muralists, too, came to be considered a

436 ALLISON ARIEFF threat to the officially entrenched styles of Socialist “Chinese artist who never showed up.” Arriving at Realism and Chinese ink painting, and were forced last in the United States in 1984, she found the tran­ to produce propaganda.^ “Everybody hated politics sition somewhat eased because she had learned some because it meant we had to obey everything the gov­ English in elementary school. But once given the ernment, the party said. We tried to get as far away freedom of expression she had so wished for, Liu from politics as we could,” Liu indicates.'^ Although realized she did not really know what she wanted to pressured to glorify party leadership, she instead pro­ do with it. She continued doing what she knew best— duced a mural celebrating Chinese music— a little murals— and waited to see how her work would personal rebellion against authority that would come evolve.® Liu credits her advisor, artist and critic Al­ to characterize her later work. The mural still stands lan Kaprow, for changing the way she thought about at the Central Academy. Unhappy with the People’s and approached art. Republic of China’s requirements for art— that it be Liu’s first major work in the United States was a completely politicized, its messages blatantly obvious mural and site-specific installation at the Capp Street and propagandizing, and anonymous^— Liu applied Project art gallery in San Francisco. This 1988 work and was accepted to graduate school at the Univer­ was a turning point for the artist. She had become in­ sity of California, San Diego, in 1981. terested in historical photographs of Chinese immi­ It took nearly four years for Liu to get a passport grants in San Francisco’s Chinatown and wanted to and permission to leave. It was difficult for her Chi­ relate their experiences to her own. One result was nese friends to understand why she would want to Resident Alien (1988; fig. 22.2), a self-portrait con­ go to the United States, since Western art was "de­ structed around a green card belonging to the immi­ generate.” But she persisted, saying that she just grant “Fortune Cookie” (alias Hung Liu). Text wanted an opportunity to look and learn. Mean­ accompanying the piece reads: “Five-thousand-year- while, in San Diego, the university waited for the old culture on my back. Late-twentieth-century

CULTURAL COLLISIONS: HUNG LIU 437 world in my face.” The themes and styles she ex­ Liu’s found images of China are reprocessed with plored in this work, which combined the traditional contemporary Western materials and modes of dis­ medium of painting with the display of objects to cre­ play but at the same time refer to traditional Chinese ate complete environments, were pursued through art-making processes, such as copying as an act of the early 1990s. Although this juxtaposition of ele­ homage. Her simulation of photography allows the ments is common to much postmodern art, in Liu’s works to preserve their documentary status even work it resonates with personal conflicts of identity. when they are being interpreted formally. Whereas In Resident Alien the image on the green card reap­ the paintings of the early 1990s were often quite propriates her own identification card photo, and her finished, truer to their photographic source, later ironic use of the name “Fortune Cookie” is sexually pieces give increasing primacy to the painterly ges­ connotative and signifies Western manipulations of ture. “Saturated with oil and mediums, my paintings Chinese culture. Liu views the fortune cookie as an sort of perform themselves,” she explains. “They apt symbol of her status because “it is a hybrid— drip, they stain, and wash the images in a way that it exists between cultures . .. it’s not Chinese and opens them to time, the literal time of gravity pulling it’s not American.”^ (The fortune cookies reappear oil to the bottom edge of the canvas.”" later, piled atop railroad tracks, in her 1994 mixed- Liu seeks to amplify “the historical moment, media installation Jiu Jin Shan: Old Gold Mountain bringing it into focus, exposing its . . . humanness” to at the M. H. De Young Memorial Museum in San ensure that the viewer understands that these images Francisco.) reflect reality.’^ She feels that her images of nine­ Resident Alien also signals the beginning of the in­ teenth- and twentieth-century Chinese women reveal corporation of photography in her art. Working from the sufferings of these women through centuries of photographs rather than live models was discouraged spiritual and physical oppression. Her desire is to ex­ in China, and Liu views her use of photography as pose the generations-old wounds of her mother, artistic defiance, a rebellion against the academy and grandmother, and great-grandmother. “Although I her education. Liu’s primary source of imagery do not have bound feet, the invisible spiritual burdens comes from books of photographs. One such book, fall heavy on me,” she notes. “I communicate with the The Face of China, published in the United States, fea­ characters in my paintings, prostitutes— these com­ tures images taken by foreign tourists in China be­ pletely subjugated people— with reverence, sympa­ tween i860 and 1912 (these pictures have never been thy and awe. They had no real names. Probably no seen in China). Two other books, which she found in children. I want to make up stories for them. Who China during a 1991 visit, contained images of famous were they.^ Did they leave any trace in history.^”’^ prostitutes, a kind of catalogue of availability; they Liu’s desire is to give these women their place in had amazingly survived the Cultural Revolution’s history. Her paintings expose the pain of the tra­ book burnings. She mines the old photographs for in­ ditional roles women were assigned, regardless of formation and insight: “I put them through rituals. I their status, according to the “three obediences” of see it almost like research or some kind of scientific Confucianism— to father, to husband, and to son. observation. I move from square inch to square inch. Before Communism, Confucianism had provided I find out a lot of things.”’® Liu returned again to the model for proper family life. It prescribed a pa­ China in the summer of 1993, discovering more pic­ triarchal, patrilineal, and patrilocal family system. tures, some from magazines dating from the 1920s to The roles, privileges, duties, and responsibilities of the 1940s. Her 1995 exhibition The Last Dynasty, at the individual were dictated by sex, age, and genera­ the Steinbaum Krauss Gallery in New York, featured tion. Confucianism officially sanctioned the domi­ imagery culled from historic photographs docu­ nance of men over women and old over young. In­ menting Qing courtiers (1644—1911). dividual identity was virtually a nonissue: one’s needs

438 ALLISON ARIEFF Figure 22.3. Hung Liu, H alf of the Sf^, I99I- Oil on canvas, lacquered wood, and ceramic. Collection of Garen and Shari Staglin, Rutherford, California. (Photo: Ben Blackwell.)

were subordinated to those of the family group.*'* Fe­ of blue adds to its status as a historical document. The males suffered greatly under this system: often they blue is cold and distant, echoing the icy stare on the were not named. Their lack of autonomy and their woman’s face. exclusion from public life were considered essential Nowhere was women’s subjugation more explic­ for the preservation of civilizadon itself.'^ An ancient itly expressed than in the practice of footbinding. ode confirms this: “The wise man founded the city; Popularized in the Sung Dynasty (960—1279), foot­ but the wise woman destroys it. . .. Disaster does not binding is chilling in its associations of manipulation descend from Heaven; it comes from Woman.”*^ and confinement. Liu views bound feet as a vivid Conditions were supposed to change under Com­ metaphor for both the shaping of women as objects munism. Although Mao once commented that "women of male desire and the distortion of the larger soci­ can hold up half the sky,” women were granted little ety through various forms of domination. Disturb­ power or autonomy under the Communist regime. ing as the practice now seems, for centuries foot­

In Half of the (1991; fig- 2 2 -3 ), Liu responds with binding was easily justified. Initially, its appeal was irony to the contradiction between what is said and purely aesthetic. Courtesans and wealthy women had what is actually meant. The Manchu woman, who ap­ bound feet, women who worked did not: it was a pears to be a concubine, has bound feet and long marker of class, a symbol of conspicuous leisure. But fingernails and is garishly made up. Her formal attire as the treatment of women became increasingly op­ immobilizes her— she appears unable to rise from her pressive, footbinding was tied to a wide range of be­ chair. The servant to her left symbolizes the woman’s havioral expectations. It was an indicator of good wealth and status. Regardless of her social standing, breeding and became necessary for obtaining suitable she possesses no power or autonomy. She is as elab­ marriage proposals.*’ Men were thus guaranteed sub­ orately decorated and objectified as the vase to her servient sex objects, while women were left with a pair left. The work’s monochromatic rendering in tones of three-inch stumps that caused lifelong pain and

CULTURAL COLLISIONS: HUNG LIU 439 Figure 22.4. Hung Liu, Goddess o f Love/Goddess o f Liberty, 1989. Oil on canvas and mixed media. Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas. (Photo: Tom Jenidns.)

made even the simple act of walking excruciating. female infanticide, filial piety, chaste widowhood, Footbinding transformed woman into a fetish and namelessness, lack of educational opportunities— thus a pure object of desire. Liu’s paintings of pros­ sustained China’s long-established male hierarchical titutes or concubines with startlingly tiny feet (termed system. “golden lilies” or “lotus petals”) posing for clients Most of the women Liu depicts have bound feet. document this phenomenon. Freud saw the custom of But in Goddess o f Love/Goddess ofLiberty (1989; fig. footbinding as a symbolic castration of women, a 22.4), she takes an especially rebellious swing at her claim that, according to French philosopher Julia country’s authoritarianism by showing a woman with Kristeva, Chinese civilization was unique in admit­ her bound feet exposed. The two-paneled painting ting. Kristeva takes this idea further, explaining that juxtaposes a Ming vase decorated with a nude couple “if by castration we understand the necessity for making love on the left with a seated woman, solitary something to be excluded so that a socio-symbolic or­ and complacent, as if resigned to her fate, on the right. der may be built— the cutting off of one part of the The vivid red of the background is the color of fer­ whole so that the whole as such may be constituted as tility and of happiness in traditional China but also an alliance of homogeneous parts— it is interesting the symbolic color of Communism. The vase (or ves­ to note that for Chinese civilization, this superfluous sel) is a recurrent form in Liu’s work and is either quantity was found in women.”’^ The various op­ incorporated in painted form or as an actual object pressive practices directed at the female population— placed near the canvas. For her, the vases/vessels

440 ALLISON ARIEFF “symbolize the fact that women, especially prosti­ so used to treating women as inferiors, to be happy tutes, were treated as mere decoration^, inhuman ob­ to see the pain that (was) caused those women.”^^ jects, beautifully made up, but empty and useless, With their references to European art-historical placed passively in the corner of the room.” These tradition, Liu’s paintings also form a critique of the containers are often empty, in keeping with the. an­ way women are represented in Western culture. Some cient Chinese proverb “To be empty of knowledge is titles, and the passive, reclining poses she uses, play a female virtue.” The objects that hang on the wall to on “masterpieces” such as Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, the right of the canvas further affirm the position of Ingres’s Grande Odalisque (see fig. 9.2, p. 188), and women in China. A child’s chalkboard is blank— a Manet’s Olympia. Such depictions of passive women symbol of the blank slate of female education. The are not part of Chinese tradition. Although women small broom beneath it represents women’s work but are often idealized, they usually are engaged in some can also be read as “a symbolic tool used to sweep activity— palace-style beauties swatting butterflies away disorder and memory. A figure with a broom or enthusiastic Communist Party members working was also a traditional Chinese character for wife.^' in the field. The woman is depicted in monochromatic sepia The image of the woman in La Grande Odalisque tones, again enhancing the historicity of the work. (1992; fig. 22.5) is taken from the book The Face o f Clearly something about this woman resonated for China. Liu makes the photograph her own by her use Liu. Her image appears again in Virgin/Vessel (1990; of color, objects, and the gestural paint drips at the fig. 22.1), her chest emblazoned with a symbolically bottom of the canvas. She presents here an elaborate charged scarlet square. Set within the square is a blue stage set, adding an element of theatricality to the vase painted with an erotic scene. The woman is fea­ work. The canvas rests on a painted platform with tured yet again in Bonsai (1992), juxtaposed against generic “Oriental” vases filled with gilt flowers at ei­ Liu’s re-creation of an ancient Chinese medical ther end and a long-stemmed gilded calla lily placed illustration. in front. The inanimate objects contrast with the The woman’s mangled feet carry the most pro­ sexually animated woman, but parallels can be drawn found message here. Never revealed, the bound foot between the two as well. Both the woman and the ob­ was considered the most erotic part of the body. A jects are viewed as possessions; both are used for dec­ special stocking covered it at all times— even during orative and utilitarian purposes. “These kinds of intercourse. Chinese artists might have depicted fe­ flowers don’t have a life,” Liu says. “They’re so male genitalia but never a naked, crippled foot.^^ Liu highly polished and decorative, but cold and de­ subverts this false sense of propriety by metaphori­ tached.”^*' The same could be said for the young cally unwrapping the bandages. In exposing the feet, woman in the photograph. In Chinese culture, flow­ she exposes the woman’s pain. Liu’s paintings are di­ ers are associated with women and beauty. Ellen dactic in their efforts to inform the viewer of the roles Johnston Laing has described, for example, how but­ and representations of women in Chinese history. terflies (associated with males) landing on flowers be­ “I’m glad I didn’t have to bind my feet,” she explains, came a way of choosing sexual partners during the “but inequality is still there.” Some viewers do not ap­ traditional Flower Morning Festival.^^ Flowers sym­ preciate Liu’s efforts. An elderly Chinese man bolize fertility and sexuality and often represent fe­ stormed out of an exhibition in San Francisco after male genitalia. Prostitutes were frequently assigned inquiring at the front desk why Liu had exposed only “flower” names such as White Orchard or Sweet the ugly aspects of old China and not its tradition of Lily. Most important, every element in this work— beautiful landscape and flower paintings. Liu was not the vases, the flowers, and the woman— is put on dis­ surprised by this reaction. “I don’t expect the gentle­ play. Liu’s Olympia (1992) is similar to her Odalisque men of our traditionally patriarchal society, who are with its reclining subject and floral display. It makes

CULTURAL COLLISIONS; HUNG LIU 441 Figure 22.5. Hung Liu, La Grande Odalisque, 1992. Oil on canvas, lacquered wood, ceramic, and antiques. Collection of Eric and Barbara Dobkin, New York. (Photo: Ben Blackwell.) reference, of course, to Manet’s scandalous study of Liu’s work attempts to mount “a sustained and far- Victorine Meurent, whose confrontational gaze reaching political critique of contemporary rep­ caused an uproar in the staid French salons. resentational systems, which have had an over­ At first glance, Liu’s passive images seem to cater determined effect in the social production of sexual to the male gaze, as did the paintings on which they difference,” as espoused by Griselda Pollock.^^ Ways are based. The confrontational expressions of her must be discovered to address women as subjects subjects, however, subvert that gaze, as does the fact rather than as objects of male desire, fantasy, and ha­ that these works have been painted by a woman. Wit­ tred. Sexual divisions have resulted from the con­ ness the confrontational sexuality of the 1995 paint­ struction of sexual difference as a socially significant ing Cherry Lips (fig. 22.6). “The women look directly axis of meaning. Pollock explains that these con­ at the camera, which means that when I look at them structions are constantly enforced by representations they look back at me,” Liu explains. “A man put them created in the ideological practices we call culture. there on a couch, a chair, with the intention to sell Pictures, photographs, films, and so forth are ad­ them as products. The women had no control. But dressed to us, the viewer, in an attempt to win our now that man is gone, yet the imagery of these women identification with the represented versions of mas­ is left. It has survived through time and space, even culinity and femininity.These representations per­ a revolution. When I felt the women looking at me, petuate existing roles. The need, therefore, is to de­ somehow I just wanted to empower them.”^*’ In reap­ construct those roles and create new representations propriating or “taking” these images from the patri­ of gender and identity. I believe that Liu’s work takes archal gaze, Liu gives something back to the passive positive steps toward that goal. women who have been objectified throughout history. A symposium titled “(re) Orienting: Self Repre­ She catalogues past transgressions in an effort to sentations of Asian American Women through the avoid their recurrence. Visual Arts,” held in New York City in 1991, raised

442 ALLISON ARIEFF Just as Liu’s paintings examine how the concept of femininity is socially constructed, they also explore how the West has constructed “the Orient.” Edward Said explains that the outsider’s knowledge of the Orient consists merely of that outsider’s representa­ tion of it. The Orient has been presented in binary opposition to the Occident and has provided the most recurring images of the “other.” The relationship be­ tween the two cultures, like the relationship between men and women, has been one of power, of domina­ tion, and of varying degrees of a complex hege- mony.^*^ By positing the Orient as “different” and therefore culturally inferior, the West assumed a sense of authority over it. “The Orient,” Said writes, “was almost a Euro­ pean invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.”^^ Numerous European artists, among them Gerome, Delacroix, Ingres, and Manet, invented their own versions of an exotic Orient. Linda Nochlin has suggested that for Western artists, the Orient existed either “as an actual Figure 22.6. Hung Liu, Cherry Lips, 1995. Oil on canvas. Col­ place to be mystified with effects of realness” or as lection of Nancy and Peter Gennet, Napa, California. (Photo: "a project of the imagination, a fantasy space or Ben Blackwell.) screen onto which strong desires— erotic, sadistic, or both— could be projected with impunity.” The func­ the issue that for Asian women in a predominantly tion of such representations was to assure the viewer white society, it is race, not gender that is often seen that the “Orientals” depicted were “irredeemably as the primary area of conflict and concern. Panel different from, more backward than, and culturally members commented that the objectification of Asian inferior to those who constructed and consumed the women, based not just on gender but even more product.”’^ significantly on race, highlights the need for a femi­ Liu’s found photographs further reveal this fasci­ nist and multicultural agenda more sensitive to the nation with the exoticism and difference of “the Ori­ needs of various groups.^^ Liu has, of course, expe­ ent.” Depicted in the images are scenes of torture and rienced this dilemma firsthand. In Women o f Color field labor, veiled brides and rigidly posed aging (1991), she interprets the politically correct cliche lit­ dowagers. Everyday life is selectively filtered to dis­ erally. Three bust-length images of Asian women, tance East from West, voiding shared viewpoints. one red, one yellow, and one blue, are placed frieze­ Present are images of “bad women” (the title of one like on the canvas. A shelf holding three vessels in the of Liu’s exhibitions)— prostitutes or courtesans who corresponding colors is installed below the painting. also serve to reinforce the moral superiority of the Color here becomes an arbitrary, meaningless dis­ Western photographer. Images of Asian women have tinction. Approaching such a volatile issue with hu­ long occupied a place in Western imagination, be they mor challenges the viewer to consider the issue of “exotic” sex object. Dragon Lady, or today’s sub­ multiculturalism as more than skin deep. missive mail-order bride. Liu and other Asian Amer-

CULTURAL COLLISIONS; HUNG LIU 443 ican women have attempted to respond to these NOTES stereotypical representations by finding alternate 1. Lisa G. Corrin, “In Search of Miss Sallie Chu,” in ways to “name” themselves in a culture unable to en­ Canton: The Baltimore Series, exh. cat. (Baltimore: compass the complexity of their experience.^^ Contemporary, 1995), n.p. Liu’s images do not always succeed on a visual and 2. Moira Roth, “Interactions and Collisions: Reflections emotional level. At times the work is too didactic, on the Art of Hung Liu,” in announcement for exhibit weighted down perhaps by her anger and the sheer of the same name at the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, volume of information the viewer needs to process. New York, May 23-June 27,1992. At times, her message seems imperceptible, especially 3. Cited in Margo Machida, “(re) Orienting,” Harbour to those who know nothing of the artist’s history. Her I, no. 3 (August-October 1991): 3 7 ~4 3 - 4. Cited in Xiarorong Li, “Painting the Pain,” Human use of various mediums and modes of display is at Rights Tribune 3, no. i (Spring 1992): 12. times too referential to the works of other postmod­ 5. Joan Lebold Cohen, “Art in China Today,” Art News, ern artists. But, in general, Liu has successfully fused Summer 1980,64. Eastern and Western traditions, combining the grace­ 6 . Interview with Hung Liu, September 1993. ful elements of traditional Chinese painting with 7. Ellen Johnston Laing, The Winking Owl: An in the Western style. The juxtaposition seems inevitable. “I People’s Republic of China (Berkeley: University of am trying to invent a way of allowing myself to prac­ California Press, 1988), 64. tice as a Chinese artist outside of Chinese culture,” she 8. Interview with Hung Liu, Society for the Encourage­ explains. “Perhaps the displaced meanings of that ment of Contemporary Art (SECA) Award (San Fran­ practice— reframed within this culture— are mean­ cisco: Museum of Modern Art, 1992), n.p. ingful because they are displaced.”^'' 9. Cited in Robin Cembalest, “Goodbye, Columbus?” Liu’s work can be read as a struggle for artistic An News, October 1991,108. 10. Liu, in SECA Award, exh. brochure (San Francisco: identity but, even more important, as a struggle to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1992). define her conflicted personal identity: “I often feel 11. Hung Liu, Artist Statement, The Last Dynasty (New suspended between the two cultures, but I see this as York: Steinbaum-Krauss Gallery, 1995), n.p. a unique position, hopefully a situation that will en­ 12. Jim Edwards, Precarious Links (San Antonio, Tex.: San ergize me,” she says. “I can look at things from mul­ Antonio Museum of Art, 1990), 26. tiple points of view. It is a position I embrace rather 13. Cited in Li, “Painting the Pain,” 10. than feel bitterness about.”^^ 14. Judith Stacey, Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in Liu’s paintings of Chinese women focus on the China (Berkeley: University of California Press,

persistence of memory. It is of paramount importance i9 8 3 )> 32-33- to her that the experiences of her subjects not be for­ 15. Ibid., 39. gotten. Recovering the history of these women ac­ i(S. Hu Shih, “Women’s Place in Chinese History,” in Chi­ knowledges their relevance both then and now in the nese Women through Chinese Eyes, ed. Li Yu-ning (Ar- monk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), 5. female struggle for equality. It also aids in forging a 17. Alison R. Drucker, “The Influence of Western place for contemporary Asian American women. Liu Women on the Anti-Footbinding Movement: 1840- continues to work toward her goal of functioning 1911,” in Women in China: Current Directions in His­ “much as the ancient scholar-painters of my home­ torical Scholarship, ed. R. W. Guisso and S. Johanessen land did, so that my art is the consequence of a re­ (Youngstown, N.Y.: Philo Press, 1981), 179-80. search process in which images from the past are re­ 18. Julia Kristeva refers to Freud’s perception of footbind­ covered, re-evaluated, recognized, and re-presented ing in About Chinese Women (London: Marion Boyars, in terms relevant to my own and I believe to our mul­ 1977)- ticultural experience today.”^'^ 19. Ibid., 83.

444 ALLISON ARIEFF 20. Edwards, Precarious Links, 27. 29. See Margo Machida’s summary of the event in “(re) 21. St&cey, Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China, 39. Orienting,” 42. 22. Kristeva, About Chinese Women, 82. 30. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random 23. Cited in Li, “Painting the Pain,” 11. House, 1979), 1-5. 24. Liu, SECA Art Award. 31. Ibid., 3-5 25. Ellen Johnston Laing, “Notes on Ladies Wearing 32. Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Pol­ Flowers in Their Hair,” Orientations 21, no. 2 (Feb­ itics of Vision (New York: Icon, 1989), 51. ruary 1990): 37. 33. Machida, “(re) Orienting,” 37. 26. Personal interview with Hung Liu, September 1993. 34. Lucy Lippard, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multi­ 27. Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, cultural America (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 137. Feminism and the Histories of Art (London: Rout- 35. Interview with Hung Liu, September 1993. ledge, 1988), 15. 36. Hung Lui, Artist’s Statement, Capp Street Project, 28. Ibid., 33—34. San Francisco, 1988.

CULTURAL COLLISIONS: HUNG LIU 445