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Summoning Ghosts: The Art of Hung Liu

March 16–June 30, 2013

The exhibition Summoning Ghosts: The Art of Hung Liu is the first comprehensive survey of the artwork of Hung Liu—one of the most prominent Chinese painters working in the United States today. Featuring approximately 80 paintings, as well as personal ephemera such as photographs, sketch books, and informal painting studies from private and public collections around the world, the exhibition celebrates Liu’s career accomplishments and includes work completed in China before the artist arrived in the U.S. The exhibition explores the evolution of Liu’s artistic practice, and investigates the complex interactions between individual memory and history, and documentary evidence and artistic expression, among other themes.

Born in Changchun, China, in 1948, a year before the creation of the People’s Republic of China, Liu lived through Maoist China and experienced the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Trained as a social realist painter and muralist, she came to the United States in 1984 to attend the University of California, San Diego, where she received her MFA. One of the first people from mainland China to study abroad and pursue an art career, she moved to northern California to become a faculty member at Mills College in 1990, and has continued to live and work in the Bay Area. She has exhibited internationally at premier museums and galleries, and her work resides in prestigious private and institutional collections around the world. Hung Liu currently lives in Oakland and is a tenured professor in the Art Department at Mills College.

The exhibition will tour nationally to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City and the Palm Springs Art Museum through summer 2015.

View Hung Liu’s work at these other Bay Area exhibitions this year:

Hung Liu: Offerings
Mills College Art Museum
January 23–March 17, 2013

Questions from the Sky: New Work by Hung Liu
San Jose Museum of Art
June 6–September 29, 2013

This exhibition is made possible in part through the generous support of the Oakland Museum Women’s Board, OMCA Art Guild, National Endowment for the Arts, Koret Foundation, Quinn Delaney and Wayne Jordan, Barclay and Sharon Simpson, Rena G. Bransten, Stephen and Susan Chamberlin, Philip D. and Shirley Dichek Schild, Gail Severn Gallery, Roselyne Chroman Swig, Bill and Judy Timken, and other generous friends of the exhibition. 

September. 2001. Oil on canvas. 66 x 66 inches (167.74 x 167.74 cm). Collection of Driek and Michael Zirinsky.
Mu Nu (Mother and Daughter), 1997. Oil on canvas diptych. 80 x 140 inches (203.2 x 355.6 cm). Collection of Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, Museum Purchase, 1997.22.
Annunciation, 2001. Oil on canvas. 80 x 80 inches (203.2 x 203.2 cm). Collection of Mr. and Mrs. H. I. Grousbeck.
By the Rivers of Babylon, 2000. Oil on canvas. 78 x 114 inches (198.1 x 289.6 cm). Collection of Peter and Dorothea Perrin.
Chinese Profile III, 1998. Oil on canvas. 80 x 80 inches (203.2 x 203.2 cm). Collection of Judy and Bill Timken.
Dangling, 2005. Oil on canvas. 80 x 80 inches (203.2 x 203.2 cm). Mr. and Mrs. Castellano-Wood Collection.
Daughter of the Revolution, 1993. Oil on canvas, wood, antique bottle. 78 1⁄2 x 62 x 5 1⁄2 inches (199.4 x 157.5 x 14 cm). Collection of Hung Liu and Jeff Kelley.