Yoke

Hung Liu was born in Changchun, China, in 1948. Her father, a former Nationalist Army officer, was imprisoned by the Chinese Communist government in 1949, leaving Hung to be raised by her mother and several aunts in Beijing. As a teenager during the Cultural Revolution, Hung was sent by the government to live and work in a rural village for several years. After returning to Beijing, she attended the Beijing Teachers College and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, where she studied Socialist Realist painting. Hung emigrated to the United States in 1984 and earned an MFA from the University of California at San Diego in 1986. She is currently a professor of art at Mills College in Oakland, California.

Hung is best known for creating paintings based on photographs. Some of the photographs she uses are historical images of life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China; others are more recent images relating to Hung's own life since her move to the United States. Many of her paintings raise issues about the historical and contemporary status of women, children, and other traditionally underprivileged social groups. The paintings also frequently address much broader questions involving the history of colonialism, emigration, and the nature of transnational cultural identity. Hung paints in an evocative, expressionistic style, building up her images with thin layers of paint that emphasize her creative process and the differences in meaning between her works and the photographs on which they are based.

Yoke was inspired by a historical photograph of a Tibetan criminal wearing a cangue, a type of heavy, wooden collar that was used as a punishment in traditional China. The dimensions and weight of the cangue were such that the wearer typically could not stand upright or reach around the collar to feed himself. Instead, he was forced to lie on the ground and depend on the kindness of passersby for food and drink. It was a cruel form of punishment that begs larger questions about the nature of justice and the power of governments to oppress their own people. The fact that the person in this image is a Tibetan who is being punished by the Chinese also concentrates our attention more specifically on the long and troubled history of relations between those two peoples.

In addition to Yoke, the AMAM owns several other works by Hung that are equally complex and interesting. In 2010, the AMAM was given the large painting Bird Bath (2001) from Hung's series Strange Fruit, a gift of Driek (OC 1965) and Michael (OC 1964) Zirinsky in honor of Gertrude B. Bestebreurtje.