My name is Hung Liu
In Chinese, it will be Liu Hung
I was eighteen.
So-called Cultural Revolution happened in China.
I was sent to the countryside from 1968 to ’72.
Four years working with the peasants in the field.
There’s no wage, there’s no weekend.
Whenever there’s a short time I always did some drawing
of the women breastfeeding baby and people so tired
they’re laying on the ground, taking a break.
I just want to do something else beside just eat
and work and sleep.
From ’79 to ‘81 I really started my so-called
professional art training at the teacher’s college.
Teacher’s college is not the best art school, per se.
We adapted the full ideology from Soviet Union.
It’s called Socialist Realism.
Like Mao Zedong said, you know, art just a part
of the big revolutionary machine.
You— you should be like a screw in the machine.
You have to do the great leader always glowing,
always taller than anybody else.
The peasants always smile, even working,
you know, in the field, the harvest.
That’s not true.
I call them Socialist Surrealism, because there’s
nothing like that in real life.
I’ve been in the US since 1984.
I got more and more into using historical photographs.
Because even without knowing anything,
you look at a photograph,
you still can tell a lot about this person.
Avant-garde is a painting I did in 1993.
I had a tiny photograph, black/white.
It’s really, really small.
When I was in college,
we were supposed to go to the countryside,
then learn from the soldiers.
We were trained then to be prepared and ready to find
our enemies.
That time, it’s very clear, number one enemy is American
imperialism.
I remember I was the top shooter.
And that picture brought back my memory, that tiny
picture, of me with— carrying a semiautomatic rifle.
Then I feel like I want to do a cutout, like a Pop
image, without any background.
And then the bayonet.
I thought, there I can, do some Impressionist.
The point is to indicate where avant-garde came from.
In China all the art schools taught Impressionism was
off track.
That was like definitely a taboo at that time.
It’s something bigger, more general than
my self-portrait.
But also, maybe some kind of comemory of the time
artists, even Chinese people have gone through.
A lot of my paintings background was circles, washes
and— and— and the drips.
I think the washes and drips maybe are a reaction
to Socialist Realism,
because the training of Socialist Realism,
you have to do everything,
you know, with fine, fine details
On one hand, I’m using historical photographs,
some really grainy
it’s already not too focused, too clear.
On the other hand,
I think when you wash away some concrete part,
it becomes abstraction.
And it’s almost like the— to destabilize the work.
The washes also almost like creating— creating a veil,
a visual veil
some part, you can focus; some pa— some part,
you cannot.
So it’s just like history.
You know, a lotta erosion,
a lot of kind of forgotten part.
