“All Over The Map” Art Exhibition | Pacifica

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Hung Liu: All Over the Map

Sanchez Art Center is extremely proud and honored to present All Over the Map, an exhibition by the renowned Chinese painter and printmaker Hung Liu, on view Feb 23–Mar 25, 2018. Concurrent exhibits are the Art Guild of Pacifica’s show titled Soundtracks, and Women’s Caucus for Art with a show titled A Room of Her Own: Beyond a Pretty Picture. The opening reception for all three exhibits will be held Friday, Feb 23, from 7 to 9 pm, with music by Rob Hughes and Alan Lee of Vivacé.

Hung Liu was born in Changchun, China, in 1948. Growing up, she experienced famine during the Great Leap Forward, and spent four years in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Her art education in China was focused on social realism, and she studied mural painting as a graduate student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Liu emigrated to the US in 1984 to study at the University of California, San Diego, under Allan Kaprow, the American originator of Happenings.

The works in All Over the Map began as oil paintings, and then, through collaboration with David Salgado, master printer at Trillium Graphics, they became mixed media works shimmering with successive layerings of translucent film and paint. Hung Liu expresses in her art her fine-tuned perceptions of the Maoist regime from her early life, and her strong feeling for the people in the photographs her work is based on. These anonymous historical photographs capture images of all kinds of people—refugees, women, soldiers, and children. But re-creating photographic images in paint is just the beginning for Hung Liu. She is well known for the way she then drips linseed oil and paint across faces, creating depth and fluidity, and suggesting the inexorable passage of memory and time. It is impossible not to feel compassion for the people in Liu’s paintings, as they reach out from their past into our present, and we feel compassion for our own fragility and mortality because of them.

In October 2017, Liu was named as one of the twentieth century’s most influential artists in ArtNet’s survey of a stellar panel of artists, critics, and art world leaders. Dorothy Moss, curator at Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, praised Liu’s “commitment to complicating the dominant narratives of history and making absence visible through work that is both searing and transcendent.” The artist has received numerous honors and awards, including two painting fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; a Joan Mitchell Fellowship; and the prestigious SGC International Award for Lifetime Achievement in Printmaking in 2011.

Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.