Hung Liu; East Meets East in the West: March 12-April 30, 1998, Limn Gallery

San Francisco, Calif.: Limn Gallery, 1997. Sqaure-liek quatro in beige printed wraps; 88 unnumbered pages: chiefly color illustrations; 25 cm. Fine with very faintest of wear to covers. New; very fine. Paperback.

Chinese-born American painter (1948–2021), born in Changchun a year before the founding of the People’s Republic. She lived through the Cultural Revolution, including years of forced farm labor in the countryside. Studied art education at Beijing Teachers College and became known in China as host of a children’s art program on national television. Emigrated in 1984 to attend UC San Diego (University of California, San Diego), taking her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in 1986. After a 1988 residency at San Francisco’s Capp Street Project she settled in the Bay Area, then taught painting at Mills College in Oakland from 1990 to 2014 and retired as professor emerita. Became a U.S. citizen in 1991. Her large portraits come from historical photographs, mostly anonymous Chinese laborers, refugees, prostitutes and soldiers, and later Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era migrants. She brought these marginal subjects to monumental scale, painting in loose, dripping washes that blur the source image, often with motifs from Chinese painting such as birds, flowers and circles. Her 1988 Resident Alien parodied her own green card. Retrospectives: Summoning Ghosts at the Oakland Museum of California (2013) and Portraits of Promised Lands at the National Portrait Gallery (2021), the first solo show there by an Asian American woman.Catalog of an exhibition at the Limn Gallery of works by Hung Liu, Zhou Chunya, Ming Ren, Guo Wei, Mao Yan, and Liu Xiaodong. Preface by James Cahill and Hsingyuan Tsao; essay, "The forest, and the trees," by Fred Martin. Includes biographical sketches. Art, Modern -- 20th century -- Exhibitions. Art, Chinese -- Exhibitions. Art, Chinese. Art, Modern. Exhibition catalogs.