Review: In “Portraits of Promised Lands” Chinese American Artist Hung Liu Demonstrates the Dignity of Complexity

By Dr. Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt

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istorically, portraiture has been the domain of the elite. For the late Chinese American artist Hung Liu, however, portraiture was an opportunity for empathy. Over a career that spanned four decades, Liu developed a practice of recovering and honoring those whose lives might otherwise be forgotten.

Her commitment and curiosity is on clear display in a retrospective of her work, Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands, curated by Dorothy Moss and currently on view at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. The show offers a powerful introduction to Liu’s work and carves out space for people who have historically been underrepresented or forgotten in this national museum. And although this is not an exhibition specifically concerned with Asian American identity, Liu’s approach also provides a rich visual language for considering the complexities of our history and our diasporic identities. 

Born in 1948 in Changchun, China, Liu came of age during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Along with hundreds of other urban youth, she was sent to the countryside for a forced “re-education.” In addition to working in the fields, Liu furtively photographed and painted the peasants she labored alongside, hiding her forbidden work from authorities. Eventually, she was able to study painting in Beijing and worked as a children’s art teacher on state television. After years of trying, she was finally allowed to emigrate to the United States in 1984 and begin graduate work at University of California, San Diego. Once there, she began to unravel the strict Socialist Realism mandated by the communist regime, exploring different ways of applying paint and using photographs as source material.

The painting Chinese Profile II (1998) provides an example of Liu’s restorative approach to portraiture. Even from across the room, the six and a half foot square painting of a young woman’s profile grabs our attention. Painted primarily with desaturated hues, but with dark red lips and a red robe, she looks like a nineteenth century tinted photograph. Her hair is pulled back into a large, fan-shaped bun, a hairstyle known as the liangbatou and associated with the Manchurian women of the Qing dynasty. If the image seems vaguely familiar, it’s because Liu based this and other paintings on photographs included in the popular, pseudo-scientific book Through China with a Camera (1898), published by the Scottish photographer John Thompson. The profile pose is typical of this kind of anthropological photography, used by westerners to scrutinize and categorize people from other cultures.

As we step closer, however, the once-clear image melts before our eyes. Liu alternates between unctuous swirls of paint and translucent drips of linseed oil that run down the canvas like a trickling waterfall. The neutral tones used to model the woman’s naturalistic profile give way to flecks of pink, aqua, and scarlet that peak out beneath the layers of gestural brushstrokes. Near the top left corner of the painting, where we would expect to see the woman’s hair ornament, we instead find a small dragon surrounded by lilies and peonies. Lifted from a Qing dynasty textile but rendered in neon coral, mint, and ochre, the dragon almost appears to be pasted onto the larger canvas. The anonymous, static woman of Thompson’s anthropological photograph is animated through Liu’s vibrant colors, energetic brushwork, varied textures, and layered imagery. Liu encourages us to imagine this woman as a real, complex person. At the same time, the disintegrating drips also serve as a kind of mediating veil, reminding us that she cannot be completely known or possessed.

The rest of the paintings chosen for Hung Liu: Portraits of a Promised Land allow us to see how Liu applies this strategy not only to Chinese women and children in history but to members of her own family, to prostitutes and refugees in East Asia, and, finally, to 1930s American migrants and laborers. Monumental shaped canvases of her parents and her grandmother blur the line between painting and sculpture. We are dwarfed by her grandmother’s body, yet there is a delicacy to the misty washes of paint and the stylized painting of Qianshan Mountain that seems to hover in front of her. In another room, a desperate Chinese refugee and her two bewildered children fill a ten foot wide canvas, surrounded by a sea of red and other Chinese symbols of good fortune and protection. The exhibition ends with Liu’s reworking of Dorothea Lange’s iconic photographs of Dust Bowl migrants during the Great Depression. Liu repaints Lange’s black and white images as a patchwork of warm, muted gray tones. Now, however, the works seem to shimmer; the multicolored underlayer peeks out between the gray smears, like a rainbow oil slick on a dark puddle.

Liu’s layered approach to painting reflects her understanding of the nature of history and memory. Unlike western portraits or documentary photographs that present a seamless veneer, Liu’s work announces itself as a construction. The collage-like sensibility of Liu’s paintings remind us that the stories we tell about our histories and ourselves are likewise fragmented and cobbled together. She evokes the inner life and agency of individuals, but the inclusion of Chinese-specific symbols or motifs also suggests the powerful role of cultural and social contexts in shaping their experience. Finally, the large scale of her work elevates her marginalized subjects while the loose brushwork and dripping paint emphasize the fragility of their position. Her figures remain perpetually out of reach yet persistently present. 

Regardless of her subject’s ethnicity, Liu used the same empathetic approach. Yet Asian American viewers may find a particular resonance in how Liu constructs her portraits of Chinese sitters.

First, there is a visual push and pull between the figures she represents and the Chinese motifs or symbols that she layers on top of them. Her subjects are undeniably unique people, but while their bodies dissolve into drips and abstract patches of paint as we step closer, the dragons, flowers, cranes, and butterflies come into focus. Depending on our literal point of view, different qualities of the painting assert themselves. Perhaps this reminds us of the complicated relationship between personal experience and cultural identity, particularly as ethnic minorities in the United States. We are our individual selves, shaped by dominant American culture, yet we are also other. Our own sense of self may even shift according to the contexts we find ourselves in. Liu’s paintings enact this duality in visual form. 

Likewise, Liu’s trailing drips evoke the way that memory slips and decays over time. Again, as Asian American viewers, we might find ourselves reminded of how precarious our cultural knowledge and connection might be. When an older relative dies, we can feel unmoored. Who will insist on a particular tradition being followed? Who still knows the recipe for that family dish? Who can retell the stories of life in their homeland or hardships endured as immigrants? Liu recalls the past while acknowledging our inability to fully comprehend it or relive it. Our cultural histories are very real, but we cannot reinhabit them. But the drips might also give us hope. The image is not destroyed, simply reshaped.  

As Asian Americans, we move between worlds or hover in between, belonging to both and to neither. Liu reminds us of how much powerful beauty can be found in that space. And perhaps even more importantly, she encourages us to look for and cherish that same complexity in the lives of others.

“Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands” is on view at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., until May 30, 2022. An exhibition catalogue is also available for purchase online or at the museum.

Photographs by the author.

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Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. As a biracial Japanese-white woman, she has navigated the joys and tensions of a hybrid identity. Elissa is currently Associate Professor of Art and Art History at Covenant College, in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. Her teaching and research focus on the intersections of race, gender, and representation, and explore the potential of art to model and encourage empathy. Website: http://elissa.weichbrodt.org | Instagram: @elissabrodt | Twitter: @elissabrodt