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Variable West: Hung Liu’s exhibition at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art was called Remember This. Can you speak to where the idea for that title came from?
Jeff Kelley: The idea for the title of Hung’s show came out of ongoing dialogues I had with Anne Rose Kitagawa, the curator, and John Webber, the director. They came up with the specific words, but it was an iteration of an idea that I pushed relating to memory. It had to do with the extent to which Hung’s work was grounded in not only memory, but in forgetting.
Her whole career has to do with layering. She uses a lot of linseed oil, so that it often seems like the image is dissolving in time or dissolving in memory. Forgetting is as much a subject of her work as remembering and history is the topic that she’s constantly addressing.
There’s this constant sense of building and then allowing an image to fall away — the way that history does, the way stories do. Stories get revised and retold. And forgotten and half-remembered.
VW: That makes so much sense. Memory and forgetting, of course, are inextricably linked, but I think people focus on the act of remembering and memorizing as opposed to forgetting, which is much less tangible. That immediately made me think of the role of propaganda, how propaganda is this kind of forced forgetting. I know that propaganda imagery was a strong influence in her work. Do you think that there is a tie between that sort of propaganda and state sanctioned brainwashing?
JK: Propaganda, I think, is an idealized form of national memory. It’s not that it’s necessarily a lie, but it’s tweaked in Orwellian ways that make it plausible. One can say that Chinese socialist realism, which Hung has trained in, comes from French neoclassicism around the time of Jacques-Louis David. Which is ironic to begin with, because there’s nothing Chinese about it. And that came to the Soviet Union, you know, so it’s a European conceit.
What both the Soviets and the Chinese came up with was a cartoon version of national memory. You have rosy cheeked children and well fed peasants and abundant colorful yams. The leader’s a head taller than his followers and everything is idealized, it’s kind of a cartoon version of realist painting, a mix of the two. Hung Liu was trained in all this stuff. UC San Diego was a very avant garde, theoretically minded school where feminists like Maria Roth and Eleanor Anten worked. Hung was also an assistant to Faith Ringgold. Her most important teacher was Allan Kaprow, who invented happenings. So, during school, her sense of art changed dramatically.
In China, Hung avoided propaganda, although she was trained in it, but she avoided it as much as she could by doing things that were more traditional. She made a very famous body of work that she called “my secret freedom paintings.” They were little oils on pieces of paper that she carried in a little box under her jacket, so nobody could see and she walked daily around the rural areas of Beijing and painted hundreds of little plein air landscapes, with no people in them.
When it was discovered that she was doing this, she was criticized for being too bourgeois and not patriotic enough. The work wasn’t about the happy peasants and the industrial progress, the great leaders and happy children. The work was just landscapes, public toilets, the trees, old bridges, factories, and things that were mundane and ordinary. They’re now in the collection of SFMOMA — thirty-seven remain after all those years.
If the question is, how did socialist realism propaganda affect her work? Partly, it drove her. It drove her into a kind of secrecy, a private way of going out and painting and engaging with the color of the world.
There are almost no people in those paintings. I once wrote that I thought that it was her way of getting as close to China and as far away from the Chinese as possible. She didn’t want to glorify the people, she wanted to paint what was around her. A very famous mural of hers was at the Central Academy, it depicted an ancient Bronze Age system of bells that had been excavated in the late sixties, during the Cultural Revolution. It was on a big wall in the foreign students dining room, which was torn down after 2000, because they built a new campus. What was important about it is that it was about China, and it was about ancient China but it wasn’t propaganda. It wasn’t about the present, it wasn’t about the government, it wasn’t about the leader. It wasn’t about the happiness of a socialist society. It was about a reverberation ringing from ancient times into the present.
Many famous Chinese artists who were at the Academy after her remember eating lunch and dinner and growing up and having rock concerts with the background of her mural. In a nutshell, I think that her entire career in the U.S. can be understood from one point of view, as a critique of the rigid academic training that she received in China. That critique took the form of the dissolution of the image, the idea that memory fades, that history is made up. There’s a tragedy and a romance and a beauty to the way that societies forget themselves.
VW: While I was reading some interviews and pieces about her work, I found a quote that really resonated with me. She described her experience of coming to the U.S. as having a 5,000 year old culture on her back and a late twentieth century world in her face, which makes me think about what you were just saying. I wondered how those different extremes evolved during her time in the States and how that manifested in her work.
JK: I remember that quote, that was from the late eighties, I think. At that time, she came to an unusual realization, and that was that although she was an immigrant, her job was not to be a migrant. It was to be, as she put it, as Chinese as possible in America.
The subject matter of that determination was inevitably immigration — coming to the U.S. Her first important works, done at the Capp Street project in San Francisco in 1988, were about immigration to San Francisco. In Chinese, the city’s name is called Jiu Jin Shan, which means Old Gold Mountain. Even today, on airline tickets and baggage claim tags, in Chinese it says Old Gold Mountain. Other U.S. cities have phonetic translations, but not San Francisco. Old Gold Mountain was the place the Chinese came to get rich and then go home.
She came through the Golden Gate, which is the title of the recent show she had at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. The work was about immigration and migration. She always remembered that she was fundamentally Chinese. But it’s important for readers to know that, while she’s regarded as Chinese, she’s not Chinese-American, she was an American citizen. And, almost all of her career took place in this country, and in this art world, and in the context of an increasingly multicultural and variously gendered sense of what art is — that’s the world that she made her career in. And she was right for it, because of who she was.
She lived thirty-six years in China, and thirty-six years in America. For the last six or seven years of her life, her focus was on the photographs of Dorothea Lange, who she identified with. During the Cultural Revolution, Hung took a lot of wonderful black and white photographs of people in the village where she worked as a peasant for four years. In a sense, at the beginning of her career, she had done what Dorothea Lange did. Then, toward the end of her life, she almost exclusively painted pictures from Dorothea Lange’s photos. Lange’s photo archive happens to be at the Oakland Museum of California, so she had access to that.
Another aspect of migration, which is kind of abstract, is that she always painted things that were a generation or more before her life. She rarely painted anything that was of today, she was always looking back. And she was looking back as far as the invention of photography. So in a sense, her work was all modern, because it was post-photographic. But mostly, the older photographs were from maybe the 1860s, and many were from around the turn of the century. She never painted life in her own time. She painted images from old photographs of a time that was fading away. The magic is that it wasn’t merely nostalgic, there was a sense of tragic memory, and a courage to hold on to it. That gave her a sense of having a history and a past and a memory. And it was her mother’s memory, it was her grandmother and grandfather’s memory. Similarly, when she started painting Dorothea Lange’s photographs, we see a migration of images from the past, into the present moment through the medium of her paintings.
There’s almost nothing that she ever painted that didn’t come from an old black and white photograph. That’s important, because the color was all her. The old photographs that we would squint to look at in black and white are presented as new, sometimes staged, sometimes candid, sometimes journalistic, sometimes evidentiary. She brought them out. It’s like she strained them through oil and linseed paints. There was that struggle playing out on the surface that was a particular line of inquiry for her and it never changed.
She knew how to write thousands and thousands of Chinese characters, some that go back generations and generations. She knew their evolution. She recognized that in China, modernity and history are intimately linked. She used bits and pieces of traditional painting, ancient painting, and sometimes written characters — historical Chinese painting modalities, that she would layer into her paintings. She tended to give the photographic subjects a historical context, which was in some ways a technique for giving them their heritage. Everything that she put in a painting that wasn’t from the photograph, she thought of as essentially an offering to the ancestors.
Remember This: Hung Liu at Trillium
Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at University of Oregon, Eugene, OR
February 05, 2022 to August 28, 2022
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Sponsored by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. Each Sponsored Connection is a pairing of two interviews. Read the interview with Toby Jurovics on Ron Jude here.