As a painter, Hung Liu challenges the documentary authority of historical Chinese photographs by subjecting them to the more reflective process of painting. Much of the meaning of Liu’s painting comes from the way the washes and drips dissolve the documentary images, suggesting the passage of memory into history, while working to uncover the cultural and personal narratives fixed–but often concealed–in the photographic instant. She has written: “I want to both preserve and destroy the image.”

The work in this exhibit dates from the past five years, including art not previously exhibited, or seen in the Bay Area. Since 2003 Hung Liu has been working with master printer David Salgado at Trillium Press on a body of dense, mixed media pieces where original images are reworked, layered and combined behind sheets of resin. Liu states, “I cannot get close to my history, but I cannot get rid of it. I’m carrying my past into the future.”

Hung Liu was born in Changchun, China in 1948, and grew up under the Maoist regime. She  studied mural painting as a graduate student at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, before immigrating to the US in 1984 to attend UC San Diego. A two-time recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in painting, Liu also received a Lifetime Achievement Award in Printmaking from the Southern Graphics Council International in 2011. Liu’s works have been exhibited extensively and collected by the SFMOMA and Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum, among others. Liu currently lives in Oakland, California, where she has been a professor of art at Mills College since 1990.

A sampling of work by well known Bay Area artists including David Best, Joan Brown, Deborah Butterfield, Viola Frey, Robert Hudson, Manuel Neri, Richard Shaw, William Wiley, and others.

Work from 1957 to the present in all media by Bay Area artists including William Allan, Robert Arneson, Elmer Bischoff, Christopher Brown, Squeak Carnwath, Enrique Chagoya, Bruce Connor, Imogen Cunningham, Jay DeFeo, Roy De Forest, Wally Hedrick, Lynn Hershman-Leeson, David Ireland, Mike Henderson, Mildred Howard, Robert Hudson, Jim Melchert, Bruce Nauman, David Park, Alan Rath, Raymond Saunders, Larry Sultan, William Wiley, and others.