Painting Life Back into History-Hung Liu's "Hard-Won" Feminist Art

Painting Life Back into History— Hung Liu's "Hard-Won" Feminist Art Rebecca Jennison When I first visited Hung Liu in her Oakland, California, studio more than a year ago, I was immediately struck by the enormous scale and volume of the works hanging on, or stacked against, the expansive white walls. The vibrant and warm welcome I received from the artist herself resonated with the larger-than-life figures there in the room with us; they too seemed to welcome me, ready to tell their stories of distant times and places. Since then I have made several more visits to Liu's studio and each time have found new works and heard new stories that have allowed me to glimpse more closely Liu's journey as an artist that began in China in the 1970s, led her to the United States in 1984, and now continues as she travels internationally and shows her work widely in both China and the United States. I first saw Liu's powerful paintings in 1996 at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in an exhibit titled Gender Beyond Memory — Worksof Contemporary Women Artists. I had been living and working in Japan for over fifteen years and had joined Japanese artist Tomiyama Taeko's "Asia, Women and Art Collective" in the early 1990s—a group of artists, researchers, and activists that met once a month in a cafe in Tokyo to discuss the intersec tions between feminism, contemporary art, and the histories of war and colonization in East Asia.1 We had read about Liu's work in Lucy Lippard's FeministStudies38, no. 1 (Spring 2012). © 2012 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 141 142 Rebecca Jennison Mixed Blessings2, and I was thrilled to be able to see it in person in this groundbreaking exhibit curated by Michiko Kasahara. I can still recall walking through the exhibition that included artists from the United States, Iran, and Japan and being deeply impressed by the innovative uses of photography in works that probed and exposed complex and contested histories of gender, race, and class. When I reached the room where Liu's Resident Alien (1988), Odalisque (1992), and Bonsai (1992) were displayed, 1 was immediately struck by these powerful works, partic ularly by the boldness with which they presented the viewer with ques tions about identity, representation, and history through exposing complex sets of gazes at "selves and others"3 In the catalog essay for the exhibit, Kasahara discussed Liu's use of a range of photographic images as a way of creating "a bridge between her present life in America and her previous life in China.'"1 Indeed, works such as Odalisque and Resident Alien use very different kinds of photographs — one of a high-class prostitute in Shanghai taken in around 1900 and the other an ID photo of the artist herself—to explore the (gendered) histo ries of Chinese modernity and that of a Chinese woman immigrant in late-twentieth-century United States. In the same catalog, Liu herself wrote: I am interested in the history [photographs] portray. Sometimes that history is my own, or my family's. More broadly, my work reflects the history of femininity in modern China ... images of "the feminine" in modern China have dominated my work."3 The photographic archives and iconography Liu was drawing on at the time included images of prostitutes, courtesans, empresses, "modern girls" of the 1930s, a male Peking opera star who played female roles, and herself "as a child in post-revolutionary China, as a farmer during the Cultural Revolution, or as a 'resident alien' in the United States."6 Looked at more closely, each image can be situated at the intersec tion of a complex set of gazes. For example, in Odalisque and other works in her series of paintings of prostitutes, Liu worked from photographs taken of Chinese women in Western-styled "stage sets" around 1900 — photo graphs that had been kept hidden in the Beijing Film Studio during the Cultural Revolution. A figure of a woman reclining on a sofa immediately Rebecca Jenmson 143 calls to mind such classic Orientalist or modernist works as Ingres's La Grande Odalisque (1814) or Manet

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