Artist, Hung Liu: You need to make a connection with whatever your subject, because when you have a human figure in any photograph or painting, you always ask, “Who's this?”
Narrator: That voice belongs to the artist who made this work.
Hung Liu: My name is Hung Liu. I was 18 [when the] so-called “cultural revolution happened in China. I was sent to the countryside from 1968 to ‘72. Four years working srin the field. Whenever there’s a short time, I always did some drawing.
Narrator: Liu immigrated to the United States in the 1980s and did not return to China until the mid-1990s. During that trip, she came upon a box of old photographs depicting people in China before the Cultural Revolution. She decided to make paintings based on these images.
Hung Liu: I got into using historical photographs because even without knowing anything, you still can tell a lot about this person.
A lot of my paintings are backgrounds with circles, washes, and the drips. Using historical photographs, some [are] really grainy. It’s already not too focused, too clear. The wash is like creating a veil—a visual veil. Some part you can focus; some part you cannot. So it’s just like history. A lot of erosion, a lot of forgotten part.
So in a way, the painting becomes like a memorial site for some lost memory. That’s to me both [a] celebration and also mourning.