Hung Liu

Chinese/American
(1948–2021)

Mongolian Moon
2004

Hand embellished print
34.5 x 34.875 x 1.5 in.
Gift of Driek and Michael Zirinsky
2020.3.11

Born in Changchun, China under Maoist-dictator rule, Hung Lui’s art captures the tumult, displacement, and emotion of epic revolution. She is one of the first Chinese-born painters to accomplish national recognition as a contemporary American artist. Often referencing historical Chinese photographs in her paintings, Lui creates and transforms these images into contemporary paintings that suggest the passage of time and memories reimagined. Termed “weeping realism,” Lui’s style summons history to the present. “I hope to wash my subjects of their ‘otherness’ and reveal them as dignified, even mythic figures on the grander scale of history painting.”

Lui studied at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing as a graduate student before immigrating to the United States in 1984. She then attended the University of California, San Diego.

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This object has the following keywords:

• carriage
• Chang'e (Taoist deity) - Sources:
  - Chang'e, 2023:
  - Encyclopedia Britannica online, September 12, 2023
  - Leach, Marjorie. Guide to the Gods, 1992
  - Wikipedia, September 12, 2023
• child
• duck
• goddesses - Female superhuman persons or other beings who are worshipped and believed to have power over nature and the fortunes of mankind.
• Matchbox labels
• Moon
• mother
• phoenixes - Mythical birds resembling an eagle but having red and gold plumage. The phoenix was said to live for hundreds of years, then it would burn itself in a funeral pyre or temple sacrifice, only to rise from the ashes with renewed youth. Variations of the myth place the birds in the deserts of Arabia or in ancient Egypt.
• Qin-Han dynasties, 221 B.C.-220 A.D.

This object was included in the following exhibitions:

• Looking Backward & Forward , 1/29/2022 - 5/5/2023

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