Hung LiuChina’s Cultural Revolution

a photo of the artist as a young woman in a field
Hung Liu working in the fields, late 1960s. Courtesy of the artist.

“I have lived many lives, some of them my own,” says Hung Liu.1 She was in high school when Mao Zedong launched China’s Cultural Revolution in 1966, during which educated urban youth were sent to the countryside to be reeducated by the working class. For four years Liu worked in the fields; she recalls the wheat harvest being the most arduous, working before dawn to pull the grain by hand before the sun beat down.2 In 1972 Liu entered China’s Central Academy of Fine Art, where she was trained in socialist realist painting—propaganda for the revolution. “I look back now and I have another label for it: socialist surrealism. Because in reality there’s no such thing like what we painted. When you work in the mud and get up at three o’clock during harvest season, nobody is smiling.”3 In 1984 Liu immigrated to the United States to attend graduate school at the University of California, San Diego. (Though Liu had been accepted to the program in 1981, she was unable to attain a passport to leave China until 1984.) The Cultural Revolution had a profound impact on her painting practice, often referencing its subjects—soldiers, laborers, and prisoners—through historical photographs brought with her from China. As art critic Bill Berkson described, “she was forced to have a sharp sense of history from the beginning and she’s carried that with her.”4

  1. Hung Liu, in “Hung Liu,” Spark, coproduced by KQED and the Bay Area Video Coalition, aired February 2005 (posted September 19, 2009), 9:12 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=LV8e43K2zCI&feature=youtu.be. ↩︎

  2. Hung Liu, “Sixty Years on a Hard Journey for Art: A Conversation between Hung Liu and Wu Hung,” in Hung Liu: Great Granary, eds. Wu Hung and Jeff Kelley (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2010), 79. ↩︎

  3. Hung Liu, interview with Kenneth Caldwell for O.K.T.P., newsletter for Paulson Press, Berkeley, California, November 1, 2008, available at paulsonfontainepress.com/wp-content/uploads/liu-2008.pdf. ↩︎

  4. Bill Berkson, in “Hung Liu,” Spark, coproduced by KQED and the Bay Area Video Coalition, aired February 2005 (posted September 19, 2009), 9:12 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=LV8e43K2zCI&feature=youtu.be. ↩︎