Painter Next Guest in USU's Visiting Artist Program

Painter Hung Liu is the next guest to visit Utah State University’s campus as part of the Department of Art’s Visiting Artist Program. Liu will present a public lecture Monday, Nov. 5, at 7 p.m. in the Performance Hall on campus (approximately 1090 E. 675 North).

USU art department programs are as part of the Caine School of the Arts, based in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.

 

The artist was born in Chang Chun, China, in 1948, and she was sent to the countryside of “proletarian reeducation” for four years during the Cultural Revolution. After earning a graduate degree and teaching at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, she was accepted into the graduate program in visual arts at the University of California, San Diego. She then waited four years for the Chinese government to issue her a passport. She finally arrived in the United States in 1984 and earned a master’s of fine art degree in 1986. Since 1990, Liu has taught in the art department at Mills College in California, where she is a full professor.

 

In addition to her evening lecture, Liu will meet with students in critiques Monday, Nov. 5, and present a workshop Tuesday, Nov. 6, from 9 a.m.-noon in Fine Arts Visual 209 (approximately 1200 E. 700 North).

 

All events are free and open to the public.

 

“I paint from historical photographs, usually those taken of Chinese subjects by foreigners,” Liu said. “These include 19th century images of Chinese female “types” — prostitutes, child street acrobats, war refugees and women laboring at such tasks as pulling a boat upriver, operating an industrial-scale loom and walking in circles (like mules) behind the handle of a millstone grinder.”

 

As a painter, Liu said she is interested in subjecting the documentary authority of historical photographs to the more reflective process of painting.

 

“I want to both preserve and destroy the image,” she said. “Much of the meaning of my painting comes from the way the washes and drips dissolve the photo-based images, opening them to a slower kind of looking, suggesting, perhaps, the cultural and personal narratives fixed in the photographic instant.”

 

Liu is a two-time recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Painting Fellowship (1989 and 1991). She has received a Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art Award (1992), a Eureka Fellowship (1993) and a Joan Mitchell Painting Fellowship (1998). In 2000, she received the Outstanding Alumna Award from the University of California, San Diego.

 

Liu has exhibited widely throughout the United States and Asia. She is represented in New York by the Nancy Hoffman Gallery, in Miami by the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery and in San Francisco by the Rena Bransten Gallery.

 

The Visiting Artist Program is funded by a grant from the Marie Eccles Caine Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Utah Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Utah Arts Council, with funding from the state of Utah, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

 

Following Liu’s visit, the Visiting Artist Program continues next year with sculptor James Surls Feb. 4, printmaker Karen Kunc Feb. 19 and potter Mark Hewitt March 24. The guests are selected for their national and international reputations and for the ways their art reflects diversity with respect to the media used and their varied backgrounds.

 

For more information about the Visiting Artist Program at USU, contact program director Marilyn Krannich, (435) 797-7373.

 

 

Contact: Marilyn Krannich (435) 797-7373, Marilyn.krannich@usu.edu
Source: Art Department