The covers of the first and last issues of Chinese Literature Today feature the work of the late artist Hung Liu, a friend of so many in the Chinese literary and art worlds. Liu was born in 1948 in the northeast Chinese city of Changchun, and today her works can be found in many of the most prestigious permanent art collections, such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Liu’s paintings have always featured migrant laborers, refugees, prisoners, women soldiers, peasants, and sex workers as well as other excluded and forgotten people, those Liu often called “spirit ghosts.” Her signature style features a deep, vibrant color palette depicting figures and scenes that merge social realist motifs with the documentary photography style of artists like Dorothea Lange, yet doused with linseed oil to create what Jeff Kelly, Hung’s husband and art critic, coined “weeping realism.”
Liu’s paintings, much like the migrant worker women writers featured in this issue, cast a light on overlooked lives and the stories of those who have been historically silenced and often forgotten. Having survived war and revolution, immigration, censorship, and displacement, Liu created works that bring forward a layered and dynamic picture of an Asian Pacific American experience. It is a great honor for CLT to feature her work on our final issue.
In 2019 authorities in Beijing prevented Liu’s debut exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Art at the last minute, citing the “politically inflammatory” nature of her work, but now CLT readers in the United States can see two major exhibitions of Liu’s work: on the East Coast, Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands can be viewed until May 30, 2022, at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, while on the West Coast her exhibit Golden Gate (金門) can be seen at the de Young Museum in San Francisco through August 7, 2022.