HUNG LIU: SANCTUARY Retrospective

Turner Carroll Gallery 725 Canyon Road Santa Fe, NM 87501 505.986.9800 turnercarrollgallery.com info@turnercarrollgallery.com

©2021 Turner Carroll Gallery

Essay: Tonya Turner Carroll Design: Darcy Spencer and Michael Carroll Front Cover: Sanctuary, 2019 oil and gold leaf on canvas, 80 x 72 x 2"

Above Image: photo courtesy of Drew Altizer

Page 96 Image: photo courtesy of Drew Altizer

Page 2 Image: Travelogue, 2004, oil on canvas, 72 x 72" collection of Tonya Turner Carroll and Michael Carroll

Page 3 Image: Pigtails, 2020, oil on canvas, 72 x 72"

Back Cover: Valentine’s Day, 2018, oil on canvas, 80 x 80"

Hung Liu: Sanctuary, A Retrospective View

“Sanctuary” is a word loaded with meaning. Colloquially accepted as a place of refuge and safety, the word sanctuary originates from the Latin sanctus—a sacred space where one is immune from persecution and is guaranteed protection from harm. Just as Hung found sanctuary in her relationships, in the United States, and in her art, she always provided safe passage for the dispossessed and forgotten in her paintings. It is only fitting that this is the name she chose for her retrospective exhibition at Turner Carroll that occurs in conjunction with her career retrospective at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery. The landmark painting of the Turner Carroll exhibition, Sanctuary, will be featured in the National Portrait Gallery exhibition in Washington, D.C.

Born in Changchun, China, in 1948, Hung Liu was forced to seek sanctuary very early in life. Her father, an officer in General Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalist army, was sent to a labor camp by the newly triumphant Maoist regime when Liu was an infant. To escape governmental retaliation, her mother was forced to divorce Liu’s father, burn his photographs, and flee Changchun for Beijing during Mao’s Great Leap Forward which ran from 1959–1961. On their journey, Liu witnessed famine and desperation. She saw a baby abandoned on the river bank by its mother—a poignant image that remains in her mind today. She knew that the baby could have easily been herself, had her own mother not sacrificed much of her own life to keep Liu alive. This concept of sanctuary not just as a physical location, but in another person’s heart and memory grew in Liu from a very young age.

When Liu witnessed her peers in the Red Guard beat and kill her high school principal, her mother and her art were her sanctuary. By the time she reached twenty in 1968, Liu was subjected to four years of labor in the Chinese countryside as part of the Chinese government’s Cultural Revolution “re-education” program aimed at re-radicalizing young people, and suppressing the intellectual class.

Liu often mentions a book she clung to during her four years of toil: Romain Rolland’s Jean Christophe. In the novel a man carries an infant across the river, even as the water continues to engulf him. Symbolizing the dawn of a new day, Rolland’s analogy gave Liu the philosophical sanctuary she needed to believe there could be a better tomorrow. This experience helped her realize the transformative power of art, and that—as an artist—she could provide that same hope for others.

During these difficult years toiling in the countryside, Liu also found sanctuary in photographing the people she met in villages in the countryside, and in painting small watercolors every day using a paint box she hid under her bed, and a secret camera given to her by a friend. Her “Secret Freedom” landscape paintings now reside in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the faces of unnamed common people she met in rural Chinese villages appear in many of Liu’s photographs and paintings in

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this catalog as well as in her National Portrait Gallery retrospective. Possibly because her own family photographs were destroyed, Liu came to realize that preserving someone’s image in art is a gift of sanctuary she could offer.

When Liu returned to Beijing to complete her formal artistic education at The Central Academy of Art, she was trained in Socialist Realism, and studied mural painting. Rather than using her artwork to glorify the Maoist regime, she chose to paint humble humans, animals, and poetic cave paintings from another time. When David Hockney visited Liu’s school, he was impressed by her humanist iconography, and remarked about Liu’s artistic bravery in his 1982 book China Diary, even including a photograph of Hung Liu in his book. After graduating, Liu petitioned the Chinese government for a hard-to-get passport so that she could travel to California and study with experimental artists like Alan Kaprow at UC San Diego.

In 1984, Liu finally received her passport and entered graduate school at UC San Diego. She left behind her only family—her mother and her six-year-old son, and she found sanctuary not only in the United States, but also in the whole new experience of contemporary art. Her artistic teachers and colleagues at UCSD included Moira Roth, Carrie Mae Weems, and her husband of 35 years, Jeff Kelley. Liu dove into the international art world head first, interacting with the top contemporary artists in the world. She often recounts the time she met Robert Rauschenberg at the Venice Biennale shortly after graduate school. When she met him, he signed her Chinese passport. Rauschenberg proclaimed that she now had a passport not only to the U.S., but also to the art world.

Liu taught at Mills College for more than two decades, and she became a lifelong, beloved mentor for her students. She received accolades like the NEA Painting Fellowships, Joan Mitchell Foundation Awards, trusteeships at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and San Jose Museum of Art, and in 2021, she is the first-ever Asian-American, woman artist to have a retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery. Smithsonian curator Dorothy Moss declares Liu “one of the most influential artists of the last 100 years.” Liu has had countless museum exhibitions and her works are now included in the permanent collections of more than 50 of the world’s most prestigious museums.

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From the time Liu arrived in the U.S. in 1984 and continuing through 2015, she expressed her art through Chinese subject matter. She gave Chinese prostitutes, workers, and the peasants she knew from her time in the countryside sanctuary in her paintings. She transformed painful realities like the Chinese practice of foot binding, mothers not having enough milk to feed their babies, or having to pull a plow with one’s own body, into beautiful examples of human resilience. In doing so, Hung Liu allows us to see ourselves in the struggles of others who often look and live differently from ourselves.

2015 marked a turning point in Liu’s career. It was thirty one years since she arrived in the United States, and she had been a U.S. citizen for twenty four years. She spent almost half her life in the U.S. by then, and became intrigued with Dorothea Lange’s Dust Bowl era Farm Security Administration photographs of American migrant workers. Like Liu had done with her own photographs of Chinese peasants in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, Lange captured the dignity of these dispossessed American souls in her photographs. In Lange’s photographs, Liu saw herself. She realized that she was the farmer leaving his homeland to find a better life; she was the child with tattered clothes not knowing what the future would bring. It was as if she lived a parallel existence to American migrants on the other side of the world. Liu began painting works inspired by Lange’s photography. When asked why she felt she could authentically paint people whose lives she had not herself lived, she insisted that “if we can adopt each other’s children, we should be able to adopt each other’s ancestors, as well.”

Hung Liu is one of the most significant humanist painters in history. Her artworks allow us to see the dignity in all living beings. Whether her subjects’ names are remembered or not, she calls them home to her art, giving their images a place of sanctuary for eternity. It is with enormous pride that we present a retrospective body of Hung Liu’s paintings encompassing her Chinese as well as American subject matter. Turner Carroll congratulates Hung Liu on surpassing political, gender, race, and social barriers in the contemporary art world, with 2021 seeing solo exhibitions in museums from coast to coast, and an exquisite new monograph published by Yale University Press.

Tonya Turner Carroll Santa Fe August 2021

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4 Red Bird Me 2008 mixed media 13.5 x 13.5"

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The Path 2011 mixed media on panel, triptych 41 x 87.5" 21

Migrant Girl with Puppy 2021 mixed media ensemble, oil, UV acrylic on aluminum and canvas 55 x 45 x 2" 67

Blue Moon 2019 oil on canvas 36 x 62" 85

Hung Liu Selected Collections

Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, AZ Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA AT&T Corporation, New York, NY Baruch College, William & Anita Newman Library, CUNY, New York, NY Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY City & County of San Francisco, Moscone Convention Center, San Francisco, CA City of San Jose, San Jose, CA Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, IN The Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO Library of Congress, Washington, DC Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco,

San Francisco, CA 24 Mills College, Oakland, CA Muscarelle Museum of Art, College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC State of New Mexico, NM Arts in Public Places, Santa Fe, NM Oakland International Airport, Port of Oakland, CA Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA Palmer Museum of Art, Lakeland, FL Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, FL Rutgers Archives, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, NJ San Francisco Federal Building, San Francisco, CA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, NE Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS The St. Paul Companies, St. Paul, MN United States Federal Building, San Francisco, CA University of Arizona, Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN Washington Convention Center, Washington, DC The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY