Hung Liu: The Chinese-American Artist Essay

The mind changes, the word changes, m doesnt stay still, history is a verb, it is on departure, there is no past tense, future tense, history is continual Hung Liu told interviewer Rachelle Riechart (Riechart). Hung Liu is a chin upese wo gentlemans gentleman who was born in Changchun, mainland lifta in 1948. She was born during the age which we augur the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which heavily impacted her flavour. She lived in China for 36 years and then go forth for the joined States. She now resides in Oakland, CA, where she teaches art at Mills College (A World of Art).A lot of her graphics is based on photographs and memories she has from China and photographs shes interpreted in the United States. She takes photographs of pictures, repaints them, usuall(a)y oil paint on canvas, and slightly alters them by leaving washes and drips to line of battle how history cant be remembered fully from a picture. She likewise does art scarper for American history such as a pi ece she did in to the south Carolina for Chinese flock who owned laundry mats (Riechart). I find more or less of Hung Lius artwork to be in truth diachronic and personal, because most of her artwork comes from her own photographs.Id like to focus on how she addresses the crusades of being an immigrant end-to-end the country, how Hung Liu maintains her cultural traditions in almost all of her artwork, and how she defines the word history. Hung Liu came to the United States during the 1980s, which was a rough season to be Asian in the United States. During this eon we were having a recession and m either auto industries were going out of business due to Japanese imports. aside from that, it was not too long after the Vietnam fight had ended. Many factors contributed to the racism targeted against Asian-Americans.Although it was the Japanese making the cars and the Vietnamese during the war, ignorant Americans would rationalize by presupposeing they all look the same and wou ld blame Chinese, Filipinos or any Asian people. There was a man named Vincent Chin in 1983, wholeness year onward Hung Liu immigrated to the United States, who was beaten to death with a baseball squash racket by a white man named Ebens, because Ebens believed Vincent Chin and his people were at fault for the fall of American auto industry. One dancer heard Ebens say explicitly Its because of you motherfu*kers that were out of work was the accusation he made.Vincent was a young man who was about to get married in a few weeks before he was murdered. His father was a Chinese immigrant who worked onerous and owned laundry mats, and after served in the military for his citizenship and was later able to start out his wife and adopted son, Vincent, to the free land (Yung). Hung Liu worked hard with extensive research to find that her fellow Chinese people who had been living in America before her had owned many laundry mats and were in truth abstruse in the laundry business.When as ked by a college in South Carolina to create a piece for them, she intentional clothing and had her family create them and this piece later off-key into a memorial for the laundry businesses in the South (Riechart). ensure 1 proscribe metropolis accede 1 Forbidden City Another struggle that Hung Liu addressed that might redeem affected her life in California was that in the 1800s, Chinese women were shipped in and used as prostitutes around San Francisco for miners (Tedford). In 1991 Hung Liu motley the Forbidden City, shown in figure 1, which shows undefendable women in the Forbidden City of China.I quality like this painting is called Forbidden for multiple reasons, one being the Palace in China was know as the Forbidden City, and similarly the painting seems Forbidden because of the naked women on the picture. Also I retrieve that because San Francisco is known as The City, the Forbidden City could refer to San Francisco as well. This piece addresses her understanding of the clog of being a Chinese-American woman at the time. Hung Liu is precise proud of her ethnical background and is not terrified to show it.Almost all of her work has Chinese subtlety in it, from the scenery such as buildings or flowers to something smaller like calligraphy. A upright example is the Forbidden City piece that I previously mentioned. It addresses an regaining that originated in California, but it shows the scenery of a Chinese Palace. She could have done this because the issue probably affects some people in China. She also does some installation art called house physician estrange, show in figure 2. This piece has Chinese people doing Tai Chi, and has Chinese pillars with calligraphy on them.Also it has two piles of probability cookies. It is believed that the fortune cookie represents a sexual slang for Chinese women (Tedford). Overall, these two pieces really incorporate the Chinese culture in Hung Figure 2 Resident alien Figure 2 Resident Alien Lius art and show that she loves to express her culture. Figure 2 Resident Alien Figure 2 Resident Alien Figure 3 Refugee Woman and Children Figure 3 Refugee Woman and Children The most distinctive property Hung Liu has is the way she defines the word history.The way she sees it is that although you can have a computer memory from a picture, you cant remember every detail from that picture, such as the words you spoke that second or what happened scarcely 20 seconds before that picture was taken, or change surface 20 seconds after. There are evermore missing puzzle pieces with history. She also believes history is a verb, because it is forever and a day happening and always going. History never ends and is always being made. The way she depicts her attitude towards history in her artwork is by leaving washes and drips of paint when she repaints a photograph.These washes and drips indicate the incompleteness of the photograph. The drips are the fuzziness of memory (Riechart). Hun g Liu uses this proficiency in the majority of her artwork and is very famous for it. The painting I chose to show her historic artwork is titled, Refugee Woman and Children, shown in figure 3. I chose this painting because it shows what was probably common for Chinese women who were refugees during measure of war and were forced to leave China. You can also see all the drips she made on the painting, which she uses to show the unknowing of what was going on during that photograph. Hung Liu is a grand artist.Shes well aware of the struggles of being a Chinese Immigrant in America where violent actions were taken on all Asians. Regardless of the risk it takes to be an Asian-American, she still proudly represents her Chinese culture in her art pieces, and she teaches the Chinese history through her art. Shes created her own style and uses a drip technique to show how she defines history, and to show from her point of view how she sees the piece and she uses photographs to show thin gs that actually happened and were caught on camera. Overall, she is a very influential woman to other Asian-Americans and aspiring artists.