Artist of the Week 1 - Hung Liu (2007)

Описание: Lucy Larson:
Hi, this is Lucy Larson...The interviews you hear were conducted in Dec 2006...Born in China, Liu now lives and works in Oakland, California...Providing additional professional and personal insight, we also interviewed Jeff Kelly...

Jeff Kelly:
At a certain level of professional achievement, artists become known for their work, then the work is known as being that artist's. And that can be because they've developed a way of making the work, a style of painting, a vocabulary of forms and materials, and a focus on particular subject matter over time. So they invent something. It's like inventing a language. And when you come into contact with that language and you recognize that it's spoken by this artist and not that artist.

Hung Liu:
What I do is I just look at a lot of materials. And sometimes, you know when you surf channels if watch TV if you have no idea what's showing, something catches you. It's like, "What is this?" Same thing visually. There always are some images speak stronger voice. So for me, I think it's very important, something moved me first, you see story interpreted from beginning to end, the narratives, but some story doesn't have that. Just even somebody's face full of stories but untold. But you feel that. So I love to look at a photograph, so like, "Wow, yeah, who's this woman? Where is this? What is this?" Especially bad photographs. Like, "What is behind her? Is it a blurry tree. What is this? What is that?" And all the kinds of yourself start to erode this surface, try to peel off, to excavate more information.

Kelly:
I think the American part of the work is that she was able to kind of loosen up the socialist realist training that she had. She learned how to paint in a kind of neo-classicist way in China in the service of state propaganda. But then after coming to the US in 1984, she slowly began to kind of loosen up her hand and mind, I think. And the way she painted, it evolved into the kind of drippy veil of strokes and marks that the work is known for today. So it's almost like a kind of dissolution of socialist realism.

Liu
And then the next step is I have some red images. They move me deeply and then I will say, "Well, I really want to do a painting," But even do this tiny, it's like a newspaper or some kind of photograph, it doesn't have the kind of power. I want them big. I want them really in your face. And you cannot deny them, even though they're nobody. They were nobody, they were anonymous, they were poor probably, they long gone. But I think somewhat they were more important than our great leader Chairman Mao, more important than Bush, than anybody, because who cares about their faces? But this is real.

Kelly
When she came to the US in 1984, she came at a time when there was quite a lot of energy still in the air regarding feminism. So she kind of came smack dab into American feminist-inspired multiculturalism and was greeted warmly by a lot of very important women historians and critics and artists. And I think that's something that she hadn't had in China either. So I think Hung came to a place where she could not only loosen up her sense of what art was and how to make it, but she could also be an artist whose subject matter tended to embrace the experiences of points of view of women and the idea of women as photographed subjects, and thus as objects. So there's a feminist thing there, too, that was not present in China.

Liu
Shoah is a big documentary on the Holocaust during World War II. Overall, the Holocaust in Europe that was written, was documented, was talked about throughout the world, but there was another battleground in Far East Japanese-occupied China since actually way before World War II started here since 1931, first occupied northeast China, Manchuria, where my family was from. It's still not as well-known as the Holocaust, so I use the name Shoah.

The image, first, the three women were from a photograph from World War II of women from the south, very south, so like Hainan Dao, Hainan Island, and so each of them was holding some kind of a makeshift weapons to fight enemies with a kind of courage and determination to protect our homeland, our homes. And behind there, the whole landscape actually, first of all, is a piece of red silk, like bright red silk, and then the film on top of the silk was a blow-up image of a mass grave in Nanjing. I think in a two or three-week period, about a quarter million people killed in Nanjing alone. Women raped and the soldiers even surrendered, all killed. They just didn't have the time and weapons to kill them, just too many. So sometimes they used machine guns, sometimes Japanese dug a giant hole, put everybody there, and buried them alive. This is, if you look carefully. It's not just a general landscape. So it's like these three women are almost like guardian angels or warriors to fight, like they arise above the ashes, or something like that.