Welcome to the Hung Liu Studio Newsletter, Fall/Winter, 2014. 

Here, we focus on Hung's return to Kansas City for the opening at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art of "Summoning Ghosts: The Art of Hung Liu," her retrospective exhibition organized last year by the Oakland Museum of California. Also highlighted are fun events like the studio Halloween break-in, some new paintings, and a look at a new museum in Clarinda, Iowa, founded by dear friends Karen and Robert Duncan. Finally, a new book, "Contemporary Chinese Art," by Wu Hung, is just out and it positions Hung Liu among the first wave of emigres from China to the US in the 1980s, along with Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, Gu Wenda, Zhang Hongtu, Chen Danqing, and Zhang Huan, among others. It is worth asserting the obvious: that Hung was the only woman. 

Kansas City is a great town. The Kemper Museum artfully displayed Hung's show. Many friends, old and new, came out for the events surrounding the opening. Our last day in KC was the final warm day of the season there, the temperature dropping 30 degrees the next day ... But the place overflows with warmth!

Enjoy the newsletter.

Kansas City Star

In "Summoning Ghosts" at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Chinese-born artist Hung Liu quite literally "summons ghosts," bringing the dead and willfully forgotten into our view through large paintings based on 19th and 20th century photographs taken in China.

 http://www.kansascity.com/search/?q=hung+liu

KQED Radio
 

Confined in China, Ai Weiwei Directs Alcatraz Exhibit from Afar (Hung Liu interviewed), Mina Kim, September 27, 2014 

SF Chronicle

Many contemporary painters struggle to get history into their work without looking pretentious or ideologically motivated. But big events of the late 20th century weighed so heavily on the life of Oakland painter Hung Liu that she might have found it difficult to keep history out of her work. - Kenneth Baker

http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/2-Hung-Liu-showings-in-Oakland-4358054.php

Square Cylinder

It's easy to marvel at how Liu's mix of abstraction and realism draw us into the past.  Yet virtuosity alone doesn't explain the emotional pull of her painting.  So I'll venture a theory: Since Liu works from photos, her painting process is analogous to the photochemical act of "fixing" an image in the darkroom from which pictures seemingly emerge out of nowhere. Liu performs a kind of psychic translation of that act, supplementing it with lived experience and an extraordinary level of empathy.  Result: she can paint from photos and literally "summon ghosts." - David Roth

http://www.squarecylinder.com/2013/04/hung-liu-oakland-museum-of-california/

KQED Radio

Hung Liu is good at summoning ghosts -- from memory and history. She's an Oakland artist born in China, and "Summoning Ghosts" is the title of a new retrospective of her work at the Oakland Museum of California. - Cy Musiker

http://www.kqed.org/news/story/2013/03/28/118497/a_woman_who_can_summon_ghosts?category=bay+area

Art-Rated

Hung Liu is widely considered one of the most important Chinese artists working in America today. - Interview by Rachelle Reichert

http://art-rated.com/?p=929

Art Practical

The spare aesthetic of the exhibition currently on view at the Mills College Art Museum belies the fullness of the Bay Area artist and educator Hung Liu's major concern: history. - Ellen Tani

http://www.artpractical.com/review/hung_liu_offerings/

Art Practical

In February 1948, the artist Hung Liu was born in Changchun, in the far north of China. Only months later, the city was the site of a major siege by the People's Liberation Army. - Matthew Harrison Tedford

http://www.artpractical.com/profile/hung_liu/

Contra Costa Times

She's internationally known for her dramatic paintings, which often layer historical images with scenes from her own life or those of everyday people who didn't make it into the history books. - Angela Hill

http://www.contracostatimes.com/breaking-news/ci_22664269/artist-hung-lius-work-blurs-history-memory

San Francisco Chronicle/SFgate

In the early 1970s, Hung Liu, who was being trained in the strict Social Realist style required of Chinese artists at the time, surreptitiously made small landscape paintings that contained no images of Chairman Mao, heroic soldiers or happy peasants. She hid them under her bed to dry. - Jesse Hamlin

http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Hung-Liu-artistic-spirit-defied-Mao-4177946.php#ixzz2R8bgcIVu

Qianshan: Grandfather's Mountain

Summoning Ghosts: The Art of Hung Liu

Essays by Wu Hung, Yiyun Li, Rene De Guzman, Karen Smith, Stephanie Hanor, Bill Berkson

Oakland Museum of California & The University of California Press