Paint splatters and bugs circle the heads of the subjects, and looking deeply into their eyes, one can see that there is more underneath the layers. This is what you can see at the new exhibit at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art called “Remember This: Hung Liu At Trillium,” an expansive exhibit into the work of the late contemporary Chinese American artist. The piece covers her work with Trillium as well as her early sketches and photographs. The pieces are a reworking of Liu’s old work and new techniques that she created and collaborated with David Salgado, master printer at Trillium Graphics, to create. Both artists have passed away, leaving behind these stunning pieces.
“Remember This” covers themes and subjects that Liu has dealt with all throughout her work: class, poverty, race, religion, politics and pain. There is much to be explored in the piece’s imagery and symbolism, but it is easy for anyone to see the emotion in the subjects of the work. In “Asparas” the face of the young survivor looks with somber eyes toward the destruction of the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake. Deeper in the piece we see a juxtaposition with the colorful flowers and a flying angelic Buddhist figure.
Many of the pieces in the collection are based on photographs from early China. Some of these images were even taken by Liu herself — this was dangerous to do during her early career as a Socialist Realist propaganda artist due to political reasons, but she was heavily interested in the form, and with a camera bequeathed to her from a friend, she took portraits of the people she met. When she studied in the U.S. at the University of California, San Diego, she had the chance to look through collections by Western photographers of images from China.
Most of these images exoticized and objectified the subjects but for Liu, “She was all about making people into people and finding people who are kind of forgotten by history or pressed down by their circumstances,” Anne Rose Kitagawa, chief curator at the JSMA, said. “And kind of giving them a moment to be heroic, you know, some dignity.” Liu also looked through many collections of photographs of prostitutes, reusing these images in pieces like “Ox Year (Cow and Girls III).”
The pieces on display at the JSMA are a remix of her old work creating something spectacular in its new form. She still references her early work as a propaganda artist but with her new perspective and techniques in its recreated form. “If you’re training to be a propaganda artist, you have to be able to sketch from life. And yet, finding a way to erase, eradicate, disintegrate that, with the way she uses drips, and she talked very pointedly about these are kind of like memories,” Kitagawa said. “Memories aren’t crisp and sharp; they get faded over time. And this kind of shows the erosion of memory.”
With the melting lines of paint and Zen ensō-like circles over the images, the layers puzzle piece together to create the depth. “I was drawn into this room by the use of color. As I got closer to the images, they were double-paned, where it’s a layer of paint and then of glass or plexiglass with paint on it,” Hailey Bloch, a senior visiting the exhibit for her art class, said. The layers she’s talking about were created by the use of resin over the piece and then painting on top of that resin.
When moving around the piece, some parts move differently based on the layer they are on. In “Cruise,” the clothes the subjects wear and the flowers surrounding them move separate to the image, causing them to move slightly as one walks by it. Even some eyes have slight dabs of paint that give them the illusion of movement.
“Remember This” will continue its stay in the JSMA’s Barker Gallery until Aug. 28. Some of Hung Liu’s work with Trillium can also be found in the Soreng Gallery.
