A Question of Hu: The Narrative Art of Hung Liu

Hung Liu (1948–2021) dedicated much of her life to artistically expressing her lived experiences during the Cultural Revolution in China by weaving together historical threads of struggle and survival through time and geographies. In A Question of Hu: The Narrative Art of Hung Liu, curator Christian Viveros-Fauné offers stunning examples of Liu’s work spanning nearly three decades, while exposing some of the limitations inherent in pulling from a single private collection.

Born in northeastern China, Liu spent her early twenties laboring in rice and wheat fields as part of the agrarian re-education program of communist leader Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. Later, she studied painting in the Soviet tradition of Socialist Realism, a distinctive style created as an artistic tool to promote communist values. In interviews, Liu has characterized what would later become her painting style as a direct rebellion against the rigidity and propagandistic nature of Socialist Realism, even as she directly references it in her work. 

Presented as part of Converge 45’s biennial Social Forms: Art as Global Citizenship, the show opens with one of her earliest mixed media paintings on an arch-shaped canvas: a sweeping black-and-white rural Chinese landscape peppered with smaller, colorful environmental vignettes. A seated figure with their back to the viewer reposes in the lower right corner as if looking onto the scene. Liu painted and fixed two found wooden boxes to the canvas, and atop each box sits a sculptural china planter bursting with flowers. A Question of Hu (1991), also used as the exhibition’s namesake, anchors the show as Liu’s most personal work. The museum label, written both in English and Chinese, explains how this early painting expresses the artist’s nostalgia for her homeland and status as “both Chinese émigré and an American immigrant.”

The rest of the main floor showcases more large-scale paintings that exemplify Liu’s signature drip technique, achieved by mixing paint with linseed oil to create a haunting, dreamlike effect. In Water Carriers (2014), human figures wearing white work garments carry water buckets up winding stone steps, their backs straining from the weight and disappearing into a drab surrealist landscape of dripping, muddying colors. 

Manchu Bride (2018) offers a colorful counterpoint to the muted rural landscape paintings and introduces the body of work that Lui is perhaps most widely known for: portraits based on found historical Chinese photographs. Here, an ornately dressed anonymous bride drips in vibrant pinks, reds, yellows, and greens against a background of gold leaf. Liu has written that her intent in these types of portraits is “to wash my subjects of their ‘otherness’ and reveal them as dignified, even mythic figures on the grander scale of history painting.” 

On the opposite wall, another large-scale painting from the same year shows an abrupt change in both subject and style. Sharecropper (2018) was created as part of a series based on the Depression and Dust Bowl era photographs of Dorothea Lange. In this painting, Liu moves away from her signature drip technique and, instead, adorns a portrait of a young Black man with colorful lines and shapes, some escaping onto the stark neutral background. The technique gives the impression of movement, as if the subject is suspended in a dynamic state of liminal space. 

Through her process, subject, and material choices, Liu uplifts subjects that historically would not have the socioeconomic power or privilege to be memorialized in a portrait. Instead of royalty and wealthy merchants, Liu honors those often forgotten by history, including laborers, prisoners, refugees, and sex workers. This act pushes back on oppressive narratives and shifts the power dynamic inherent in collective memory — compassion shining through above all. 

On the lower level of the gallery, we start to see the breadth of Lui’s mediums and subjects included in the Jordan Schintzer Family Foundation’s collection. The rich textural impact of two massive tapestry paintings share wall space with shiny and glossed multi-media canvases. Smaller scale lithographs stand in dialogue, such as a portrait of young children next to a nursing mother (based on a photo by Lange). Perhaps most impactful, is the “Official Portraits” series (2006), made up of three prints that explore Lui’s immigrant identity and depict the artist at different stages of her life: Proletarian, Immigrant, and Citizen. Collaged onto the lower right corner of each boldly colored print are photo IDs she was issued in China, a rare personal addition amongst the works on display. 

Works referencing Dorothea Lange’s portraits spark questions about reframing historical narratives and the dialogical relationship between Liu and Lange — the latter who famously rejected the idea that her work was not art, insisting on the power of direct documentation in the service of social change. In writing and interviews Lui has expressed interest in how meanings shift when a historical photograph is separated from its original context. What is gained and what is lost through the iterative process of reimagining Lange’s subjects? 

While the implication of a universal experience is clear in viewing all of the works in the exhibition, a curatorial opportunity to choose examples from a wider selection of Lui’s artworks may be able to help better connect the various historical narratives that the artist explores. Still, the collection presents a striking number of Lui’s works that recontextualize collective memory and offer a sense of shared humanity in a burst of colors and textures.

A Question of Hu: The Narrative Art of Hung Liu
Presented in partnership with Converge 45: Social Forms: Art as Global Citizenship
Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU, Portland, OR
August 22 – December 2