| Sanchez
Art Center is extremely proud and honored to present All Over
the Map, an exhibition by the renowned Chinese painter and
printmaker Hung Liu, on view Feb 23–Mar 25, 2018. Hung Liu was born
in Changchun, China, in 1948. Growing up, she experienced famine
during the Great Leap Forward, and spent four years in the countryside
during the Cultural Revolution. Her art education in China was focused
on social realism, and she studied mural painting as a graduate
student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Liu emigrated
to the US in 1984 to study at the University of California, San
Diego, under Allan Kaprow, the American originator of Happenings.
The works in All
Over the Map began as oil paintings, and then, through collaboration
with David Salgado, master printer at Trillium Graphics, they became
mixed media works shimmering with successive layerings of translucent
film and paint. Hung Liu expresses in her art her fine-tuned perceptions
of the Maoist regime from her early life, and her strong feeling
for the people in the photographs her work is based on. These anonymous
historical photographs capture images of all kinds of people—refugees,
women, soldiers, and children. But re-creating photographic images
in paint is just the beginning for Hung Liu. She is well known for
the way she then drips linseed oil and paint across faces, creating
depth and fluidity, and suggesting the inexorable passage of memory
and time. It is impossible not to feel compassion for the people
in Liu's paintings, as they reach out from their past into our present,
and we feel compassion for our own fragility and mortality because
of them.
In October 2017,
Liu was named as one of the twentieth century's most influential
artists in ArtNet's survey of a stellar panel of artists, critics,
and art world leaders. Dorothy Moss, curator at Smithsonian National
Portrait Gallery, praised Liu's "commitment to complicating
the dominant narratives of history and making absence visible through
work that is both searing and transcendent." The artist has
received numerous honors and awards, including two painting fellowships
from the National Endowment for the Arts; a Joan Mitchell Fellowship;
and the prestigious SGC International Award for Lifetime Achievement
in Printmaking in 2011.
Liu has exhibited
internationally at premier museums and galleries, and her work resides
in prestigious private and institutional collections around the
world. Her current exhibition at the National Museum of Women in
the Arts, Hung Liu in Print, opened January 19, and will
be on view through July 9. In 2013, the Oakland Museum of California
organized a retrospective of her work titled Summoning Ghosts:
The Art and Life of Hung Liu. In a review of that exhibition,
the Wall Street Journal called Liu "the greatest Chinese
painter in the US." Her works have been collected by the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art,
NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the National Gallery of
Art, Washington, DC; the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco; and
the Los Angeles County Museum, among others. Though her work and
life have indeed taken her all over the map, Liu now lives and works
in the Bay Area, and is Professor Emerita at Mills College, where
she has taught since 1990.
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To learn more
about the artist and her work,
come to the Artist Talk on Sunday, Mar 25 at 3:30 pm.
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An Artist Talk with
Hung Liu, curator Philip E. Linhares, and Trillium Graphics founder
and master printer David Salgado, will be held in the Main Gallery
on Sunday, Mar 25, at 3:30 pm. The support of Don Horsley, Premier
Presenting Sponsor for Hung Liu's All Over the Map exhibition,
is kindly appreciated.
Sanchez Art Center
is located at 1220 Linda Mar Blvd in Pacifica, about a mile east
of Highway 1. Following opening night, the galleries are open Friday,
Saturday, and Sunday, 1–5 pm, and by appointment, through Mar 25.
For more information, email info@SanchezArtCenter.org
or call 650.355.1894.
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