Steinbaum Bernice Gallery

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Richter Scale, 2009, oil on canvas, 80in. x 160 in.
Hung Liu has been represented by the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery since 1990. In the art world 20 years is a lifetime. Her use of photographic images into the realm of painting increases our distance from the original image and opens the work up to a host of new meanings. Through re-inscription of vintage and new photographs, Lius paintings punctuate the contradictions of modernity and the mutability of history.
Photography has become inextricably intertwined with the way we live, love and think. Its meanings are never fixed. Who poses, how they pose, and why they do, are subjected to an infinite variety of cultural and social rules. The historic photographs on which Liu bases her work are fragments of a partially forgotten history. Present in this body of work is an enigmatic tension between fact and meaning, nostalgia and irony, reality and fantasy.
The recent earthquake in Haiti is reminiscent of the 2008 earthquake in the Sichuan Province in China, and the 1976 earthquake in the northern part of China that killed 240,000 people. Liu witnessed that devastation first hand. In Richter Scale Liu transcends her nationality, bridging our associations of empathy and sympathy, while retaining a brutal honesty that avoids sentimentality.
Lius work underscores the inherent compassion we have for those who have survived a life-changing disaster. Whether it is an earthquake in China or Haiti, a hurricane in New Orleans, flooding in Pakistan or a Tsunami in Indonesia, this series of paintings demonstrates how our identity as people supersedes our individual (and often clashing) cultural identities.
Everythingthe images, the overlays, the forthright brushwork, the pictures as a groupis soberly judged, deeply felt, mature. Its hard to ask for more. -Holland Cotter
Holland Cotter is a Pulitzer Prize winning art critic for the New York Times