Reaching In and Reaching Out

Hung Liu
Apsaras
Nancy Hoffman
September 10 – October 31, 2009



Loss, expressed through reverent mysticism, is on view in Hung Lui’s show at Nancy Hoffman. Her large-scale oils hang like silent effigies to the living, documenting a wide range of moments that are presented to an omnipresent observer like prayers. Painting from photographs in the wake of the cataclysmic 2008 Sichuan earthquake that shook China and cost hundreds of thousands of lives, Liu creates portraits that say less about any one individual and more about the universal emotions of fatality that surface when life crumbles around us.

Liu’s often paint laden canvases represent a play on the Chinese Social Realist style she was trained in. Instead of choosing idealized settings and figures to represent the betterment of the Chinese people, her large scale canvases focus on individual moments of humanity. In Mirror, a young girl’s self-reflection is captured in the midst of the devastation that was once her room as she mindlessly combs her hair in the mirror attached to the front of her destroyed armoire. The quality of the paint application is what gives the scene its sentiment with soft, streaky, luminosity despite heavy, painterly, smudges. The canvas becomes an ephemeral surface, the patterned wreckage of the room emanating in bright pastels all around the placid central figure; a break from the chaos. The right two feet or so of the canvas is given over to a bloody, red panel with a black circle—a Buddhist symbol of rebirth—hastily posited in the center and hovering over a mess of black slathered below it. The panel adds a sense of immaterial resonance through its abstraction, a metaphysical contrast to the details of the physical in the majority of the painting.

Liu continues in this vein, the circle reprising itself in red in the background of a funeral march, as a group of weary soldiers carry a cloth-wrapped body up a steep hill of rocks. The circle leaks pale streams over the men’s heads, as though blessing their efforts. It shows up again in a series of small digital illustrations featuring the faces of children often seeking comfort in the arms of parents and older siblings, their small faces unable to comprehend the weight of the decimation around them. In another series, she paints the faces of subjects praying, crying, physically damaged, and hiding as small Apsaras, the Buddhist spirits of fallen heroes, drift around their heads.

Liu takes on a forceful, traumatic subject, but the delicacy of her touch on the lives in these moments is what speaks. She uses her paint as a tool to mediate the overwhelming horror and lay it to rest.