- Binstock, Jonathan P. “Hung Liu.” In American Kaleidoscope: Themes and Perspectives in Recent Art, 120-131. Edited by Jacquelyn Days Serwer. New York: National Museum of American Art Smithsonian Institution. Distributed by Distributed Art Publishers, 1996.
Binstock’s essay provides extensive biographical information about Hung Liu in order to describe the development of her art. He explains Liu’s methodology by focusing on a few of her important paintings, including Children of a Lesser God, Grandma, Baby King, The Ocean is the Dragon’s World, Five Eunuchs, and Father’s Day. Binstock explains Liu’s work as an effort to bring new recognition to anonymous people and misrepresented or forgotten events of China’s past. The mining of Chinese history in Liu’s artwork, according to Binstock, also seems pertinent to her experience as a Chinese citizen under chairman Mao, as a Chinese-American, and as a woman in modern Chinese and American societies. Binstock includes a quote taken from an interview of Liu by Moira Roth for Liu’s solo exhibition at the Berenice Steinbaum Gallery in New York in 1992: “I shifted my art work from socialist realism, the style in which I’d been trained, to social realism; and it transformed my personal identity crisis to a crisis of cultural collision.” (p. 124).
- Bryson, Norman. “Hung Liu’s Goddess.” In Hung Liu: A Ten-Year Survey, 1988-89, 17-25. Wooster, Ohio: The College of Wooster Art Museum, 1998.
Bryson examines Liu’s painting Goddess of Love, Goddess of Liberty. In his discussion of this image, he focuses on Liu’s appropriation of a photograph of a Chinese woman with feet that have been deformed by the traditional practice of foot-binding. Liu used this same photograph in her lithograph entitled Bonsai, which is in the collection of the Washington University Gallery of Art. In the context of her Goddess painting, Bryson explains that Liu has appropriated the image in order to represent several discourses, including an orientalist discourse and one about modern Chinese society under Mao. Bryson also examines Liu’s method of painting from photographs and how this allows her to build on issues already associated with an image in order to make her own, multi-layered discourse about her identity and experience as a Chinese-American woman.
- Desai, Vishakha N. “Whither Home? The Predicament of a Bicultural Existence.” In Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art, 26-40. Guest curator Margo Machida. With essays by Margo Machida, Vishakha N. Desai, and John Kuo Wei Tchen. New York: The Asia Society Galleries and The New Press, 1994.
Desai gives a personal account of her experience as an Asian American to explain issues of bicultural existence that are explored in the work of Asian-American artists in this exhibition catalog. She explains that her narrative highlights the “three-pronged dimension of the émigré Asian American experience – leaving one place for another, personal circumstances and psychological changes, and a strong sense of being perceived as an ‘other’ – and the complex relationship among these three…” (p. 27). Desai’s essay can be used to help develop an understanding of how Hung Liu has addressed her personal experience as an Asian American through her art.
- Gouma-Peterson, Thalia. “Hung Liu: Stories, Identities, and Borders.” In Hung Liu: A Ten-Year Survey, 1988-98, 9-16. Wooster, Ohio: The College of Wooster Art Museum, 1998.
Gouma-Peterson focuses on Hung Liu’s use of the photograph of a Chinese woman who exposes her bare feet that had been deformed by the traditional practice of foot-binding. Liu used this image five different times. It appears in her lithograph Bonsai, which is in the collection of the Washington University Gallery of Art. Gouma-Peterson examines the implications of this image and how Liu has appropriated its discourse value to create her own dialogues about Chinese heritage and tradition, lost history, and her own identity as a bicultural woman artist.
- Hickey, Dave. “Hung Liu’s Paintings and the Polity of Immigrants.” In Hung Liu: A Ten-Year Survey, 1988-1998, 27-30. Wooster, Ohio: The College of Wooster Art Museum, 1998.
According the Hickey, Liu exemplifies a new type of cultural cosmopolitanism, in which the artist’s interpretation of various cultural experiences cohesively combines past and present, West and East. This approach is unlike the one taken by traveling artists of the nineteenth century who appropriated foreign ideas and styles to fit neatly within the hegemonic principles of their culture of origin.
- Kim, Elaine H. “’Bad Women’: Asian American Visual Artists Hanh Thi Pham, Hung Liu, and Yong Soon Min.” Feminist Studies 22, no. 3, Fall 1996, 573-602.
Kim examines the phenomena of what she terms Asian American female ‘badness.’ This ‘badness,’ according to Kim, “challenges both Western patriarchal racism and patriarchal attitudes and practices in Asian American families and communities, which are profoundly influenced by Western concepts and customs.” (p. 577) Kim explains how Liu’s images challenge such authoritarian principles by creating new discussion on traditional Chinese cultural practices in conjunction with multicultural American issues. Kim uses Liu’s print Bonsai as an example in her discussion.
- Lippard, Lucy R. Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America. New York: Pantheon Books, 1990.
In her chapter entitled “Landing,” Lippard discusses the importance of “place” for artists working within a multicultural society. She examines the ways in which different artists of various ethnic and racial backgrounds are “grounding” themselves in order to come to terms with issues relating to the multicultural experience. About Hung Liu, Lippard writes, “In her later work she has continued to juxtapose images of China and Chinese American life from past and present, recording the cultural changes experienced by other individuals and families as a way of understanding her own transformation, which is documented in her art.” (p. 144)
- ———. The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art. New York: The New Press, 1995.
This collection of Lippard’s essays is divided into three parts to make distinctions between her work from the early seventies, her essays from the late seventies, and the issues she has been addressing from the early eighties through 1993. In compiling the text in this format, Lippard intended to acknowledge her conception of the evolving and expanding discourse of feminism within the context of art criticism. In the interview entitled, “Art in a Multicultural America: An Interview with Lucy R. Lippard by Neery Melkonian,” (pp. 296-309), Lippard discusses her book Mixed Blessings and how the issues confronted by bi-cultural artists living within a dominant white, male culture in American society are often either entwined or compatible with the feminist issues. Lippard’s exploration of multiculturalism as an adjunct of feminism creates a rich intellectual discourse on various aspects of marginal cultures and society in the United States.
- Roth, Moira (Moderator), Steve French, Hung Liu, Suzanne Lacy, Chris Johnson, Michael Grady, Carlos Villa. “Relearning in Further Education: Curriculum, Hiring and Recruitment.” In In Worlds in Collision: Dialogues on Multicultural Art Issues, 278-293. Edited by Reagan Louie and Carlos Villa; David Featherstone, Associate Editor; Carlos Villa, Project Director. San Francisco and London: International Scholars Publications and the San Francisco Art Institute, 1995.
In this published discussion from the 1989 San Francisco Art Institute symposium, Moira Roth invited faculty and administrators from various universities to present their ideas, thoughts, and experiences regarding the ways in which academic institutions (particularly schools of art and humanities) deal with the issues of multicultural curriculum, the hiring of faculty and the recruitment of students within a multicultural American society. Hung Liu contributed to the discussion by recalling a racist transgression made against her during an interview with a major West Coast university. She also explained how, as a professor of art at Mills College, she has encouraged her students to explore their own families’ traditions in order to help them develop their individual modes of artistic expression.
- Tchen, John Kuo Wei. “Believing Is Seeing: Transforming Orientalism and the Occidental Gaze.” In Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art, 12-25. Guest curator Margo Machida. With essays by Margo Machida, Vishakha N. Desai, and John Kuo Wei Tchen. New York: The Asia Society Galleries and The New Press, 1994.
Tchen explains how the works of the émigré artists highlighted in this exhibition catalog pose existential and political questions that deconstruct the American-Orientalist (or what Tchen refers to as ‘Protestant-Orientalist’) fetishization of Asian peoples and cultures and redefine Asian-American identities. The works done by these artists reflect the complexities of cross-cultural experiences and challenge audiences that have been conditioned by the Orientalist ideologies of the dominant culture to reconsider society from multicultural perspectives. Although Hung Liu’s work was not included in this exhibition, the issues addressed here are pertinent to the ideas about Asian-American identity and experience that she explores in her work.
- Zurko, Kathleen McManus. “Staging Reality: An Interview with Hung Liu.” In Hung Liu: A Ten Year Survey, 1988-1998, 31-45. Wooster, Ohio: The College of Wooster Art Museum, 1998.
In this interview Hung Liu answers questions about her experiences during the Cultural Revolution in China under chairman Mao, her status as a Chinese-American, and her role in feminist movements as a woman artist. She explains how she uses her life experiences as resources for her work to validate and assert her identity as a minority living within a dominant Anglo-American culture. Liu also discusses how her approach to art-making changed drastically after she began studying art in the United States.
Jodi Kovach
MA 2003
