Chinese Culture Center Online Gallery
San Francisco, CA, USA 中華文化中心電子畫廊
Profile Information
- Where are you located? 你的居住地區？
- San Francisco Bay Area, USA
- Art medium or relation 藝術體裁或联系：
- Painting/繪畫
- About Me (bio) 個人簡曆:
- I have been painting in America since 1984, but Chinese history has always been the essence of my work. I grew up singing The Internationale. In my middle school English class, our teacher gave us the English version of the lyrics. We once truly believed in Communism, in a socialist utopian dream, and in heroism. I have since replaced those beliefs with a kind of modern humanism, but some fundamental values and ideology from my thirty-six years in China stay with me. I was never interested in being a victim struggling in an authoritarian society. I admired heroes and wanted to be a tough solider. Even today, when I'm wounded, I'd rather lick the blood and get back to work – like the women soldiers in “Daughters of China,” the 1949 propaganda film that serves as the basis for my most recent paintings. Usually I paint from historical photographs of China, but in this case the film offered me a sequence of panoramic stills, each frame filled with the heroic and desperate struggles of eight female soldiers who, in 1938, sacrificed their lives to save the retreating Chinese army. I saw this film as a child in China, and it shaped my expectations of women as protagonists in the emerging socialist utopia. Of course, utopia never arrived, but a kind of hard won feminism stayed with me the rest of my life and served me well in America. History is not a static image or a frozen story. It is not a noun. Even if its images and stories are very old, it is always flowing forward. History is a verb. The new paintings are my way of painting life back into my memories of a propaganda film that, over time, has become a document of the revolutionary sincerity that permeated my childhood. Even the actors in the film believed in their roles. When they walked into the river, carrying their dead and wounded, they were going home.
- Website 網站:
- http://www.kelliu.com
- What language do you speak? 你通曉哪些語言？
- English and Chinese
- Are you a member of Chinese Culture Center? 你是中華文化中心的會員嗎？
- NO
Hung Liu's Images
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Chinese Culture Center Online Gallery
Chinese Culture Center
Videocast from CCC 最新网播
Slideshow of the Chinese Culture Center's In Search of Roots Program (2007) sponsored by Cathay Paci
View our slideshow to get an idea of the journey our 2007 Roots participants experienced to discover their ancestral roots in China.
Reuter's Segment on Chinese Culture Center's In Search of Roots Program (2007) sponsored by Cathay P
This is Reuter New's segment on the 2007 CCC Roots participants visiting their ancestral roots in China.
Chinese Culture Center's In Search of Roots Program sponsored by Cathay Pacific Airways
NBC Bay Area news recently ran a segment about the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco's Roots program.
© 2008 Created by CCC
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what a surprise to find you here on this listserv! i have been following your work for years. i went to ccac 10 years ago, and went to one of your lectures in our school one time. i had also seen a local pbs program featuring you and your story, including an antidote about your not having a photo in the studio so you can concentrate on your work... somehow that detail really stuck with me. your work, with its bright colors invoking traditional chinese crafts and cultural works, and the symbolism of butterflies , flowers, etc, has always facinated me. i hope to visit you one day at mills college when i come back to visit the bay area--my brother still lives there. i live in madison now, but will probably move to california one more time soon, thank you for sharing your work here!