FULL SPECTRUM 2012 | AUCTION LOT 11

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Hung Liu
Cradle, 2009
Oil on canvas
24 × 48 inches
Courtesy of Rena Bransten Gallery

Retail value: $20,000

On May 12, 2008, a devastating 8.0-magnitude earthquake hit China’s Sichuan province, leaving nearly 90,000 people dead and 4.8 million homeless. Hung Liu was en route to Beijing when the earthquake struck and she closely followed the media coverage of the disaster. This incident reminded the artist of the 7.8-magnitude Tangshan earthquake of 1976 that she experienced firsthand; despite the enormous death toll, it attracted scant attention. The 2008 Sichuan earthquake therefore struck a personal chord and provided Hung Liu with material for a new body of work: a series of paintings drawing on media photographs of survivors and motifs from traditional Chinese paintings and folk art. 

Cradle, 2009, is from this series, which distinctively combines realism with abstraction. The left-hand side of Cradle is abstract but specific to Chinese heritage, infused with both the Chinese-American artist’s personal cultural narrative, as well as that of the earthquake’s victims. The circle that dominates the left half of the canvas is Chinese symbol for pi, which represents eternity and the universe in Chinese philosophy. The symbol is also used to punctuate the end of a sentence in Chinese writing; its use in this context therefore might symbolize an endpoint, perhaps the end of sorrow. 

For the image of the mother and child on the right-hand side of Cradle, Liu used a photograph by Dan Chung that was originally published in The Guardian (London). Rubble and destruction are visible in the photograph, but Liu removed the evidence of the disaster in the painting. This decision combined with her placement of the mother and child in an ambiguous, neutral space, indicates that, ironically, the subject of the painting is not the earthquake, but the resilience of the human spirit even under extreme conditions. Liu explained, “It is really about humanity.” 

Hung Liu was born in Changchun, China, in 1948 and grew up under the Maoist regime. After studying mural painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, she immigrated to the United States in 1984 to attend the University of California, San Diego, where she received her MFA. She currently lives in Oakland and is a tenured professor in the art department at Mills College, Oakland, California. Her work is included in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the de Young Museum, San Francisco; and the San Jose Museum of Art. 

Five works by Hung Liu are in the collection of the San Jose Museum of Art, including the painting Chinese Profile II, 1998. Her work will be the subject of a series of exhibitions and collaborative programs at SJMA, the Oakland Museum of California, and Mills College, Oakland, in the spring and summer of 2013. 

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