HUNG LIU
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      • The Music of the Great Earth (1981)
      • Up and Tao (1986)
      • Reading Room (1988)
      • Map No. 33 (1992)
      • Fortune Cookie (1995)
      • The Long Wharf (1996)
      • Above the Clouds (2002)
      • Hearts in San Francisco (2004)
      • Going Away, Coming Home (2006)
      • Take Off (2008)
      • Highland Hospital Acute Tower Replacement Project (2016)
  • Studio
MODERN TIMES 

Based on a 1960’s photograph of a daydreaming cafeteria worker, Modern Time (L) presents a double image of two very different dreams.  On the right a worker is momentarily lost in a reverie, yet caught in the modern dream of a socialist utopia, whose pantheon of theorists and politicians (Marx, Engles, Lenin, and Stalin) hangs above her on a wall of Chinese red.  On the left, that same worker – now taking on the musings of the artist – dreams of a different modernity, one less rational, more fluid and expressionistic, than political ideology might allow. The portraits above her are by – and in one case, of – Vincent Van Gogh, whose tragic alienation from modern society suggests individual nightmares as much as collective dreaming. Meanwhile, the Mao-clocks on the shelves around the painting tick away as modern time unwinds its revolutionary inevitability.


Copyright Hung Liu 2016