San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Visual art: Revisiting one of Hung Liu’s final interviews.
By Letha Ch’ien
She picked up the phone with a chortle: “You’re exactly on time!”
The great Hung Liu — artistic luminary, progenitor of the weeping realism technique (dripping washes of linseed oil over photographic images), “America’s most important Chinese artist” — was a fan of punctuality.
Our interview was meant to cover her show at the de Young Museum, “Hung Liu: Golden Gate,” but Liu’s answers took an expansive view, drawing connections across her life and career. Her answer to my first question lasted 42 minutes. We would spend the morning discussing her thoughts about bridges and gates as metaphors for immigration, migration and living between cultures.
It would be one of her last interviews. Just four weeks later, on Aug. 7, Liu died from swiftly progressing pancreatic cancer. She was 73.
Born in 1948 in Changchun, China, Liu and her family experienced the Cultural Revolution’s cruelties firsthand. Six months after her birth, Liu’s father, an officer in the Nationalist Army, was imprisoned in a labor camp. Liu didn’t see him again until 1994.
She was sent to the countryside for re-education. In 1984, after waiting four years for a passport, she immigrated to the United States to study at UC San Diego. She eventually settled in Oakland, teaching at Mills College while building an incandescent studio career.
Obituaries haven’t spared the superlatives. “Inspiring” and “trailblazing” are more than deserved. But during our conversation I discovered her thinking was more complex than that of the straightforward heroic figure some articles described.
I was caught off guard, for instance, when she asked about me. My father received his green card around the same time Liu received hers, and she wanted to know about my experience. More than a few times as we spoke, I felt like Liu had reached inside my chest, grabbed my heart and yanked it out so we could examine it together.
She told me about fortune cookies, a repeated motif in her work, and about a sense of identity caught between places. Liu recalled first encountering fortune cookies at a Chinese restaurant in California. “You should know this, you’re Chinese,” grad school friends told her. “And I said, ‘What is this? I’ve never seen this in my whole life.’ ”
Her research told her that a Japanese man in San Francisco had invented the dessert. “I realized fortune cookies were a minor thing, a joke but a hybrid thing — you don’t know where it is from.”
That was one time when I felt my chest tighten. How often have I heard food jokes about my own hybrid indeterminate status? Banana, Twinkie, coconut — insults too familiar to Asian Americans — land in that space between secure identity and hybrid outsider.
In 2019, Liu joined a memorial of the 150th anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad at the Nevada
Museum of Art. She read the names of the known Chinese railroad workers, including some whose recorded names — such as “Joe China” — were not their own.
Liu understood the wrenching nature of living in between. In “Resident Alien,” her 1988 painting of her permanent resident green card, her own name is replaced by “Cookie, Fortune.” It shows the contradiction of belonging somewhere while remaining an outsider.
Of her resident alien green card, she explained, “I’m critical about the term ‘alien,’ but also grateful about it. So it’s complicated. Not only joyless.”
I didn’t cross the Golden Gate as an immigrant. I was born in the U.S. Still, a birth certificate listing my name in both the
Roman alphabet and Chinese characters was enough for a DMV employee to ask me why I was here. Liu sized me up, intuiting experiences I hadn’t described: “You are American by birth, but you have some bridge to cross too.”
Her Golden Gate Bridge immigration metaphor elucidates the possibility of going from one place to the next. But it also underscores that those two places never actually exist in the same space.
Like many people, I’ve cried over that bridge, the one Liu calls the “psychological cultural bridge.” You can try to cross the bridge and connect, but bridges exist because there are gaps between places. And the gaps don’t close just because there’s a way across. Bridges are more complicated than a straightforward tale of immigrant survival or triumph.
Liu invited us to stare gimleteyed into the divide and to face the difficult and multifaceted alongside her.
“I feel like maybe the best work … raises more questions than answers,” she said. “I don’t “Hung Liu: Golden Gate”: 9:30 a.m.-5:15 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. Through March 13. Free. Museum admission is $15; $12 for those 65 and older; $6 for students; free for those 17 and younger. Advanced time tickets required. Free admission for Bay Area residents on Saturdays. De Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, S.F. 415-7503600. deyoung.famsf.org
like simplified things. Simple things can be beautiful in art and writing, but not simplified. It’s not just like that. I like to challenge whoever sees my show, who sees my work.”
We exchanged emails a few times after our interview but did not speak again before Liu died. But these words will stay with me: “Remembering is the real thing. Otherwise, (our memories) will be really dead. Dead, really gone. I think we need to leave the door open to remember. I could only do so much, my tiny bit.”