Modern Time, oil on canvas, lacquered wood, antique revolutionary clocks, 2005   66" x 168" x 5"

All images courtesy of Nancy Hoffman Gallery.

January 17 through February 23, 2006

   On Thursday, February 2, Hung Liu will give a talk on her work, to be held in the Multipurpose Room, Paul Robeson Campus Center (2nd floor), 5:30–6:30 pm. There will be a reception in the gallery following the artist's lecture, 6:30–8 pm. These events are open to the public and admission is free.

Full Circle: Revolutions in the Paintings of Hung Liu

To come "full circle" means to come back to where one has been before. Whether that place is spatial, thematic, or emotional, it is never the same as before. Hung Liu paints circles on the surface of her finished canvases, suggesting eternal returns to something above or beyond the historical elements in her paintings. Circles symbolize eternity in Chinese philosophy, and in Chinese writing they punctuate the end of sentences, like periods.

Hung Liu was born in China the year before Mao Zedong established the People's Republic of China (1949). As an urban young woman during Mao's Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), she was sent to be re-educated by working on a peasant farm for four years. In 1984 she entered graduate school in the United States to expand her study of art, which in China was confined to traditional and Social Realist styles of painting. The experience of the Cultural Revolution, and the history leading up to it, are among the subjects she comes back to and transforms, in turn.

Relic 9, oil on canvas and lacquered wood, 2004      66" x 66"                                 Red Wash, mixed media print, 2005      37" x 34"

Hung Liu's paintings resurrect images of women from turn-of-the-century photographs she found in the Beijing Film Studio Archives. There she also discovered a photographic book of courtesans—a catalogue of young women available for sexual hire. Liu's portraits figuratively rejuvenate the spirit and life of these archived souls by introducing them to a wider public imagination and by improving their lot in the life of pictures (in visual culture). "You free them in the sense of giving them dignity," Liu says. "If you give them dignity, they have a place whether they're a prostitute or a low-class laborer."

There is, in this sense, a revolutionary thread that runs through these works. In returning to the alluring beauty of the courtesan, Hung Liu's paintings pass through the modern struggle for social power by women, to arrive at a new position of seductive strength. This, too, is the social power of art: to allure and captivate the imagination of the viewer.

Swan Lake: The Red Detachment of Women, oil on canvas, 1995     56" x 105"

Sole Maker, oil on canvas, 2002    60" x 48"

"Full Circle" is organized by Jorge Daniel Veneciano, Director, Paul Robeson Gallery.

This exhibition is made possible by the assistance and generosity of Hung Liu, Nancy Hoffman, Christopher Watson of Nancy Hoffman Gallery, and David Salgado of Trillium Fine Art Press.

Paul Robeson Gallery, Rutgers-Newark
350 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd., 1st Floor, Newark, NJ 07102

Gallery hours: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday 10am-5pm, Wednesday 12 noon-7pm