IN AMERICA 2001 - 2021
This Land ...
In “This Land …,” Liu continues her focus on Dorothea Lang’s subjects as they migrate across America in the 1930s in search of work, dignity, and salvation. Though it invokes the title of Woody Guthrie’s famous anthem of 1940, itself written as a rejoinder to Irving Berlin’s “America the Beautiful,” the title of Liu’s exhibition, “This Land …,” does not offer the visions of sweeping vistas – the ribbons of highway, the golden valleys, the diamond deserts, or the wheat fields waving – but a landscape of human debris strewn along the roadside from the dustbowl to the promised land. Broken down cars, flattened tires, stranded and damaged and hollow people, tarpaulin and cardboard shacks, a harvest of bitter onions. These are like the ellipsis in the title, “This Land …,” indicating an omission, all that America the beautiful was not.
Liu’s painting style, with its fluid washes, expressionistic brushstrokes, and eroding photo-based images, has often been thought of as a kind of weeping realism – especially when applied to Chinese subjects. Reacting against the rigid techniques of Chinese Socialist Realism, in which she was trained, Liu’s hand has fervently but deftly engaged her subjects, turning old photographs into new paintings, and anonymous figures into dignified individuals. For her Lange-inspired works, Liu has developed a kind of topographic painting technique in which she “maps” an image with colored lines, the richness of which belies the real-world poverty of her subjects. What emerges is a kind of vascular web of color that hold the images, especially those of people, more firmly in place. Liu thinks of these webs as cracks of light breaking through, maybe hope, an homage, perhaps, to Lange, who was working to change the plight of the migrants she photographed.
These new paintings confidently combine Liu’s traditional weeping realism and her more recent topographic mapping. The human figures depicted are mostly studies in dejection, with several instances of stolen affection or unexpected gratitude. Of this latter, a woman holding a baby – they appear to be Mexican – looks upward and smiles as they sit beneath the crotch of a cottonwood tree. One feels they have just crossed a river, now reborn. Beside the woman’s head, attached to the canvas, is a head-size gold-leaf oval, invoking the idea of portraiture and raising the portrait to the status of an icon – perhaps as the Virgin of Guadalupe. At this moment, an unpublished stanza from Guthrie’s song echoes back through time to the present:
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing;
This land was made for you and me.
Liu’s painting style, with its fluid washes, expressionistic brushstrokes, and eroding photo-based images, has often been thought of as a kind of weeping realism – especially when applied to Chinese subjects. Reacting against the rigid techniques of Chinese Socialist Realism, in which she was trained, Liu’s hand has fervently but deftly engaged her subjects, turning old photographs into new paintings, and anonymous figures into dignified individuals. For her Lange-inspired works, Liu has developed a kind of topographic painting technique in which she “maps” an image with colored lines, the richness of which belies the real-world poverty of her subjects. What emerges is a kind of vascular web of color that hold the images, especially those of people, more firmly in place. Liu thinks of these webs as cracks of light breaking through, maybe hope, an homage, perhaps, to Lange, who was working to change the plight of the migrants she photographed.
These new paintings confidently combine Liu’s traditional weeping realism and her more recent topographic mapping. The human figures depicted are mostly studies in dejection, with several instances of stolen affection or unexpected gratitude. Of this latter, a woman holding a baby – they appear to be Mexican – looks upward and smiles as they sit beneath the crotch of a cottonwood tree. One feels they have just crossed a river, now reborn. Beside the woman’s head, attached to the canvas, is a head-size gold-leaf oval, invoking the idea of portraiture and raising the portrait to the status of an icon – perhaps as the Virgin of Guadalupe. At this moment, an unpublished stanza from Guthrie’s song echoes back through time to the present:
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing;
This land was made for you and me.
