Quick response to Hung Liu's lecture!

For me, the biggest success in Liu’s work (among countless other points) is her natural ability to recall art history with her painting techniques. Her colors, animals/vegetation, and geometric symbols all have references to historical traditions and past artists from her home country. However, Liu’s work functions as a contemporary version of those historical themes, and by extent one voice (or hand, rather) documenting them as perceptions change. She also combines eastern and western painting styles having practiced in both China and the United States, adding to her work’s dimensionality in style. Finally, her use of damaging oil “drips” that run down her paintings creates a strong metaphor for the photographs she uses as a reference, in respect to the poor quality of the photographs, how these types of photographs were often destroyed by political regimes, and how the people in the photographs could have been any of the victims of Mao Zedong’s rule. I find this tension between her reference and technique to be beautiful, in the sense that with one type of painting mark Liu can simultaneously reference the erasing of personal lives and histories by political struggles that she lived to tell about.

Hung Liu was a captivating speaker; I admired the sense of humor she carries to shed light on the “heaviness” of her art. She seemed to have a very global outlook on life, as her art has developed and become conceptually stronger with age. I think Liu is the definition of a fundamental artist; from her early simple yet elegant line drawings, to her large and complex figure paintings, to her multi-dimensional sculptural work, her aesthetic is admirable for the pure level of skill and depth in content. I am grateful to have had the chance to hear one of the great artists of my time speak about her work; I look forward to Liu’s work becoming a source of inspiration for my own in the future.