Hung Liu "Apsaras"
Nancy Hoffman Gallery
This event has ended.
On May 12 2008, as Liu arrived in Beijing for two solo exhibitions of her work, the 8.0 Sichuan Earthquake hit the mountainous regions of southern China, killing approximately 90,000 people, including thousands of school children whose shoddily constructed class rooms collapsed. In the year since, Liu has devoted herself to a series of paintings depicting people in the aftermath of the Sichuan quake. The subject of these paintings is less the disaster itself than the expressions of mythic emotions on the faces of the survivors: grief, shock, confusion, stunned silence, courage, and mourning. Passing across their faces, both figuratively and literally, are traditional images of Buddhist flying angels, known in Chinese as Fei Tian. More generally, they are known as Apsaras, or heavenly nymphs. In the late 1970s, Liu studied and copied the Buddhist iconography painted on the walls of the ancient Dunhuang Caves in Gansu Province, located along the Silk Road in the Gobi Desert. As she has often done in her paintings of the past ten years, Liu “offers” her modern subjects, whether refugees, soldiers, laborers, or children, examples of their own ancient culture– in this case, the flying angels of Dunhuang. This act of offering has sometimes been misunderstood as a form of postmodern bricolage, in which disparate images are plucked from various historical sources and juxtaposed in ways that challenge, rather than reinforce, meaning. In fact, the images of birds, flowers, and religious iconography Liu circulates within her otherwise photo-derived visual fields are more like prayers than provocations, attempts to repair a picture broken by war, famine, social chaos, or, as in these paintings, earthquake. In addition to her human subjects, Liu has painted a sequence of four images of a dead deer she found and photographed as she was hiking near her home in Oakland, California. Photographed from above, the prone animal, though lying on the ground, seems to be flying or rotating through space.
[Image: Hung Liu "Apsaras-Blue" (2009) oil on canvas 72 x 72 in.]
Media
Schedule
from September 10, 2009 to October 31, 2009