Artist Hung Liu (Chinese-born American, 1948–2021)
Title Shui — Water (Shui)
Date 2012
Medium Color aquatint, soft ground, drypoint, scraping, and and spit-bite with gold leaf on paper
Dimensions Image: 36 x 26 in. (91.44 x 66.04 cm)
Sheet: 47 x 36 in. (119.38 x 91.44 cm)
Framed (Exhibition Frame): 53 1/8 x 39 1/8 x 2 in. (134.94 x 99.38 x 5.08 cm)
Credit Line Purchased with funds from the Thomas T. Solley endowment fund for the Curator of Asian Art, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University
Accession Number 2013.53
About this Work
Perhaps the most famous Chinese-American artist working today, Hung Liu didn’t immigrate to the United States until she was thirty-six-years old. Born in Changchun, People's Republic of China, Liu was trained at the Beijing Teachers College in a rigid Chinese Social Realist style. Her later paintings and prints combine representational subjects with a postmodernist appropriation and layering of imagery and a fluid, expressionistic technique.
This work is based on a turn-of-the-twentieth-century picture of a prostitute, whose services were advertised in a mail order catalog. Since most of this type of imagery was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, it represents a lost (or hidden) aspect of Chinese history. Liu combines the portrait with a traditional water landscape based on an earlier woodblock print. Although the woman has a beautiful peony flower and a butterfly—symbols of good luck—on her coat, a sinking boat in the background hints at a society in crisis.
