First-Generation Painting

April 7, 1995 George Leonard

Is there a difference between Asian art, and Asian American art? How, after all, can a physical object be said to be “Asian,” or “Asian American?”

Hung Liu

I have thought about similar questions before. Since I am living in the United States, I can say that my life is now here, in the present tense. But China is just across the gulf, as if you could feel it. Like next door. That distance, which I have crossed, has fundamentally changed my perceptions. Like an ancient Chinese landscape painting, my life is filled with multiple perspectives. I no longer consider myself a “pure” Chinese. What that means is that I am a Chinese in the process of becoming an American, like most Americans. But for some of us, we were already adults when we came here. I had 36 years of my life in China. I was already educated and experienced enough. My language was good. But in coming here, I had to start all over again, to adapt to this culture as an adult. If I had been a child when I came here, it would have been easier. Life now runs in parallels, one real and present and one underneath the surface of everyday life. When I go back to China now, I realize how much I’ve become American without knowing it.

GL

AmyTan, in the beginning of The Joy Luck Club, starts with the premise that a woman came to America and said, “Here my daughter will not be judged by the loudness of her husband’s belch.” Here, her daughter could be a person. Feminism as a motive for coming to the United States, does it ring any bells? Trig ger any thoughts?

HL

I think there’s a very general idea in China about Western humanism. We knew something about the Constitution, human rights, that human beings will be respected, no matter men, women, poor, or rich; that’s the general idea about freedom in the West.

GL

Can you connect that then with the art? With being Asian American as an artist?

HL

You brought up Amy Tan’s book. Because she was born here, she didn’t come from China, her mom did. When I saw the movie, The Joy Luck Club, especially the flashback about people fleeing the civil war and her mother abandoning her baby sisters, I thought it was too theatrical, too fake, not even Hollywood. My mother told me about a similar story from the same period, and I was one of those babies. It wasn’t like in the movie. The reality was too miserable. I am not saying that Amy Tan has to know what it was like, how could she?

GL

But I don’t want to get into that so much as to know, to what extent can an object be Asian American, or Asian? Has your art changed?

HL

My art is absolutely not pure. It is already a hybrid that involves looking at historical materials and visual references, mostly photographs. Maybe because I’m Chinese, the Chinese subjects in those photographs stand out. For instance, the sequence of three paintings I did of a baby eating are hybrids of a kind of stereotypical Chinese subject— a small child eating—and the almost cinematic framing of three shots in a row, a sequence in time. This was almost never done by Chinese families. In the 1950s, Chinese families didn’t have their own cameras. Each photograph was very precious; a roll of film could last a whole year, each picture reserved for important events. But here we have a very Western perspective—it reminds me of Muybridge—built into the sequence of the shots. The image is already very candid, almost a documentary of this cute girl. She wasn’t posed either. If I had never left China I would probably look at it differently. I might not have seen the sequence as a sequence—as an esthetic structure. I would just have seen three similar—and maybe unnecessary—shots.

GL

Of the Asian American artists you’ve seen, is there anything about their art that looks obviously more American than Asian?

HL

Many artists from mainland China try to forget about being Chinese and “catch-up” by becoming “American” artists, like trying to be Jackson Pollock or whoever. We never had modernism in China, so in a way Chinese artists follow modernist footsteps when they get here.

GL

That’s the peril of the first-generation artist? They’re too desperate to catch up?

HL

Yes, and by doing so they date themselves. Also, in order to become “American” artists, they often change their styles, but not their concepts.

GL

I see how daring your own personal decision is then, to stay Chinese in your work.

HL

Yes, but using the training I had in China. In terms of technique, draftsmanship—I am very good. Why should I abandon it? The question is how to use it now. I want to frame it in a contemporary setting while still using my skills.

Jeff Kelley

Could I interject something? It’s just an observation, but I’ve always thought, in relation to your (George’s) question about how an object can be Asian American, I think that Hung is essentially a Russian painter. Her oil painting training came from Russia; it really is nineteenth-century Russian Realism with some French Impressionism filtered through it, except that modernism didn’t get to China. If you look at the painting Hung did of the child eating, you’ll see something that has much more to do with the Russian style of oil painting. So when you ask the question of whether an object can be Asian or Asian American, I think that Hung’s are already hybrids, and that critics have hardly ever touched upon this kind of mixed pedigree when they write about her work. They’re so focused upon her being Chinese—and on her Chinese subjects—that they seldom talk about the identity of the work as an object, which, if she weren’t Chinese, is probably all they’d talk about.

HL

So then everything I do will be Chinese because of who I am?

Figure 61–1 A—C: Sequence (simei 1954), By Hung Liu, 1995. Photos by Jeff Kelley. Used by Permission of the Artist. Private Collection. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203344590/ccc72934-66b3-441b-80da-fa4d20d5a179/content/fig61_01a_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203344590/ccc72934-66b3-441b-80da-fa4d20d5a179/content/fig61_01b_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> JK

Well I think what’s Chinese about your work—besides, of course, your subject matter—is probably some sensibility about a kind of wetness or dissolving quality that reminds me a lot of traditional Chinese landscape paintings. Even more, though, in a contemporary sense, your work is a postmodern hybrid of identities—it’s European, via Russia, and then across the Pacific to California. And from here you can see all these properties.

GL

We’ve already begun to talk about a concept Cornel West and others have come up with, called “the burden of representation,” a burden that affects everyone who is an “ethnic” artist. Hemingway can write about whatever the hell he wants; so can T.S.Eliot. But if your name is Hung Liu, then damn it, you’ve got to be Chinese. That’s part of the burden. The second part is that you’ve got to represent your ethnicity well. If you’re black, you can’t write about Tho mas Jefferson, you have to write, as West says, “the novel of blackness.”

HL

I started with mixed blood: I am part Mongolian and, as Jeff said, my education is not pure—in China I learned more about Russian artists than Chinese. The burden you mention is an expectation from inside and outside: Americans expect me to be critical, and my Chinese country-fellows expect me to represent China in a way that doesn’t expose its dirty laundry. These expectations deny one’s individuality as an artist. I recently did a painting of turn-of-thecentury child laborers in Baltimore, from a photograph of a cluster of young, bare foot children working in a cannery in very bad working conditions. There are no Chinese subjects in this painting, but the reason I had a passion to do it was because it reminded me of—you know what?—Russian painting. Art is the part that interested me—not class consciousness, political correctness, or ethnic identity, but the fact that it was in a sense already a Russian painting, like the kind I had studied in China. By doing this painting I was commemorating part of my past as an artist. The theme of immigration is not just autobiography, or a cultural story, but also a metaphor of how art changes.

JK

Still, a lot of people assume that the meaning of your work is the meaning of the subjects you select, especially the images of young prostitutes, concubines, and so forth—even of yourself. But the paintings are not just subjects, they are also objects. I guess what I’m asking is, What are the differences between your photographic subjects and the painted objects they become?

HL

Well, for me painting is a process that opens up the photographic instant. If a photograph was taken in a moment of time, then a painting extends that moment into a week, a month, or beyond. In a sense, the painting process erodes the documentary surface of a photographic image, opening it into layers of canvas, wash, sketch, stroke, drip, and so forth. I often feel as though I am excavating the photo surface, trying to locate the narratives beneath it. Figure 61–2 Hung Liu in her California Studio, 1995. Photo by Jeff Kelley. Courtesy of the Subject. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203344590/ccc72934-66b3-441b-80da-fa4d20d5a179/content/fig61_02_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>

I think probably much of the meaning of my painting comes from the way the washes and drips dissolve the documentary authority of the photographs I base them on, creating marks of time—like the time it takes for a drip to drip or an image to dissolve—marks that record the ritual of painting, which is very different from the idea of a photographic instant.

For example, last summer I returned to my ancestral home, a small village in Manchuria, for the purpose of sweeping the graves of my grandparents and uncle. Most of the villagers—who are my relatives—turned out for the ceremony, which involved carrying offerings to the grave mounds, cleaning the mounds, installing new head-stones, and listening to oral narratives about my late relatives’ place in the history of the village. As the day unfolded, one ceremonial moment rolled into the next with an informality that was different from the seriousness of Western funerals, but was no less moving as an emotional, communal event.

In the middle of this flow, we snapped pictures with our cameras, trying to capture its most posed, pictorial moments, like the high-points in a play. What this means to me is that the photographs taken that day were not isolated “slices of reality,” but photographic traces that emerged from the flow of ritual time and space.

Out of this experience, I painted a painting called “Burial at Little Golden Village,” a large canvas of my face and a corn field beyond. The image came from a snapshot taken that day. Back in the studio, months later, I realized that the painting was not just an homage to the grave sweeping, but also a metaphor of my own emigration to America, since the corn field could also be in Iowa or Nebraska. Painting allowed me to complete a narrative of cultural and emotional transition that I didn’t even think about when the photographs were being taken. It was only during the extended time of painting that the deeper resonance of my own personal and cultural memory could be experienced. Painting tied the experience into something larger than myself.

So I use one medium to thaw-out another. My art is a hybrid. Maybe that’s what makes it Asian, or Asian American, like me.