Artists Who Inspire: Hung Liu | Rev. Dr. Daniel Kanter | 07.28.024
Sermon Transcript
In 1991 and 1992, I led two groups of American teenagers from the YMCA camp I grew up in in Massachusetts to China. This was just two years after the Tiananmen Square massacre, where protestors attempting to demand democracy in China were mowed down and run over by tanks in their country by their own government, images that those of us who were alive at the time will never forget. Two years after the massacre, in an exchange program with the YMCA I was sitting in the homes of Chinese hosts in Shanghai and Beijing and other places listening to their veiled concerns about their government. One couple I will never forget were teachers and our hosts for a few days. We sat in the privacy of their kitchen apartment as they told me about their experience in the Cultural Revolution, a time when a political youth movement swept China into a frenzy of purging intellectuals and anything anti-communist and anti-Mao.
The wife told me how she was taken out of the school that she was in to a rural farm, and having been accused of some heresy against her comrades, was thrown into a deep hole where she broke her femur and was left there for a week. With tears in their eyes, they recounted the stories of the abusive Red Guard, the treatment of the students and their teachers, how they survived by keeping their heads down, and how the current moment looks so bright compared to the past, and how they were concerned about having me in their kitchen, a foreigner being watched by the government. You see, in 1966, just about the time I was in utero and some of you were protesting the Vietnam War and some of you were fighting there and many of you weren’t even a thought two generations away, the Cultural Revolution was declared by the Chinese government to be a great revolution that touches people to their very souls and constitutes a new stage in the development of the socialist revolution in our country, they said.
The objective was to struggle against and overthrow those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic authorities and the ideology of the bourgeoisie. Violence and chaos ensued in China in that time. The Red Guards, some of them 13 or 14-years-old, sought to destroy the four olds, they said, old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits by destroying historical artifacts, cultural and religious sites, and targeting intellectuals. The government lifted restraints on violent behavior, instructed the police to stand down. Millions of people were affected. Students were publicly humiliated. Their teachers were publicly humiliated. Libraries of historical and foreign texts were destroyed. Books were banned and burned. Science was questioned, religious places demolished. Clergy were arrested and sent to camps after being forced to participate in the destruction of their own places of worship.
The rise of this conformist movement came on the heels of Mao’s takeover of China, but it also came on the heels of the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s and the 1940s. Now, I’ve been studying this period of time just to put some markers in the ground for myself about what it’s like for countries to move in these directions of conformity and fascism. What I’m finding is that the steps include things like the banning of books, the making some people illegal, the restricting of rights, the name-calling of groups of people, especially aimed at academics and intellectuals. That fascism’s defining characteristics look like this list that I’ve created from my studies, a stress on the primacy and glory of the state, the unquestioning obedience to its leader, the subordination of the individual’s will to the state’s authority, harsh suppression of dissent.
Marshall virtues are celebrated while liberal and democratic values are disparaged. The use of violent language or open violence, which gives way to legal violence under the veneer of respectability, happens. The disbelief in the legal process, rabid nationalism, the complete state control of every phase of human activity, the active participation in war to the extent that any protest against war is seen as unpatriotic, the idea that one party and the state are one and the same, the deification of the nation and its leader and the nourishing of nationalistic and warlike passions. Need I say more?
In the midst of the Cultural Revolution in China, the wave upon the wave of nationalism and fascism, which became Maoism, was a woman named Hung Liu. She is our artist today. She was an artist who was sent to the fields to reform her intellect into being a comrade of the state. Hung Liu, the artist who inspires today, was sent to farms to work in the farms and given a gun to protect the perimeter. She kept her mind sharp while plowing the fields and keeping the perimeter of her camp safe by practicing her art, and here she is in the Cultural Revolution.
She survived by practicing her art by secretly photographing the coworkers in her camp, by making sketches of them. All would’ve been punishable by death if she had been found. And eventually, after she left the camp, she became a painter for the revolution, making propaganda posters of Mao, the supreme leader who was always bigger and taller than everyone and always surrounded by happy, smiling workers and revolutionaries. Hung Liu eventually went to teachers college and then somehow escaped to the US to study art. Her response to the years of having had her family imprisoned, killed, and her own forced labor was art, was revolution, was response, was taking back the integrity of people and ideas lost and submerged by the government.
This is Hung Liu in 2021 before her show at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. Photos that she took in the Cultural Revolution became her first paintings. Her aim was to show that the real workers of the revolution, not fictional, happy followers of Mao, but strained and struggling people, the people that she worked alongside and knew. She adorned these paintings with circles, a constant in her work, which she said were symbols of hope. The aim in painting the real people of Mao’s revolution was to restore to them their dignity, to help us not forget who they were and what they endured.
She would use textured backgrounds representing the veil of history and flowers and Chinese symbols of hope throughout her career. Symbols of Buddhism and ancient China were painted alongside her lost coworkers, an act of restoring what was destroyed in them in her country. Her painting, like this one of a mother and daughter pulling a boat with ropes tied to their waists, showed the real labor of people she knew, in an attempt to give them dignity in their work, and after their deaths dignity and immortality so that they would not be forgotten.
She returned to China after it opened to the west years later not only to find her father who had been imprisoned for all those years, over 30 years, but also to find her culture. She found photo albums of people from the imperial courts that had not been destroyed. She was especially taken by the women, and especially by the courtesans, some prostitutes who were given to leaders by Korean invading armies before Mao, some who worked in the courts. She painted them and adorned the canvases with streaks, veils, and birds and blossoms, all symbols of dignity, her aim to restore dignity to those who were abused and forgotten. Through her work, Liu examines women’s joys and hardships, their vulnerability and their tenacity, their relationships with one another. Once victims of anonymity, these figures reemerge in her work as dignified symbols of strength and perseverance.
Hung Liu explained this saying, “I hope to wash my subjects of their otherness and reveal them as dignified, even mythic figures on a grander scale of history and paint.” She said, “We need to remember where we come from. Our history is with us and we carry it everywhere. My subjects in the prints are anonymous people, the ones who fought in wars and provided food for the rest of us. They are not remembered for making history as world leaders. But to me, they are the true makers of history.” She was similarly taken by the photos of her family that she was forced to hide and carry and protect all those years that she was in China. Sisters are a theme for her, the strength of women, their dignity in the struggle.
She also made art installations of women of Imperial China, their feet bound so they could not protect themselves or escape the desires of men. In this painting, she was in Arlington, Texas during Tiananmen Square massacre, and she put this installation together demanding that she put a woman with her bound feet in the front, disfigured alongside vessels of the goddess of love and liberty. Bound feet referenced for her the women and students and young people bound by government restrictions and violence by laws of her country that disabled democracy. She put cups and a broom and a chalkboard representing women as vessels, the way the blood was swept away in Tiananmen Square, and how the act of the erasure of history was an affront to all.
And then, Hung Liu moved on to the American historical photos of Dorothea Lange from our own dust bowl. Whoops. And refugees and migrants in our own country, mothers and children and victims of reconstruction resulting in poverty. These formally enslaved families who lived in ramshackle farms while working the same fields that their ancestors did picking cotton, she put them on canvases, restoring their dignity. She had them looking at us through her paintings. Circles of hope, blossoms, birds of freedom. “Don’t look away,” she said with her paintbrush. Remember your history. She worked hard to restore the dignity, to ask us not to look away, to see our history for what it was.
She took on other issues also. When she was finally naturalized in our country and was taken by this idea that, to make a life in America, you had to be called an alien, the official state name for who she was. So she painted this painting in resistance to all that are called alien in her new country. The painting is called Fortune Cookie. She said of this painting that she was neither American nor Chinese anymore. She was a multicultural condition and a rule breaker. Liu made the words resident alien large as criticism of her status as an immigrant living in what she said was the promised land. The word immigration changed to image nation, her new birthdate the day she was naturalized, her fingerprint and her self-portrait as part of this piece.
My wife and I saw her paintings in a small gallery in Santa Fe not long after she died of cancer in 2021. We were touched by her insistence to restore the dignity to the dead. And in that show, I read these words that she said, “I want to work to be a comfort to people I’ve never known, and others like them who lost their dignity because of political or economic reasons. People want to connect and be heard,” she said. “To be an artist, I can speak for other people as well as for myself. People want to connect and be heard and be seen and be remembered. This is an act of resistance to a world of erasure and simplification of forces that want to dumb down every answer to life’s problems and push aside civility and the dignity of all.”
Hung Liu and her own quiet way refused to let this happen, refused to let us deify leaders while forgetting to see each other. Refused to allow violence to be what we honor, or the suppression of dissent or the questioning of the state be normalized. We honor her today, an inspiring artist and person for standing up to forces that aim to pull her down, for unfair labels, for forces that try to erase history or people from history, for living a life of resistance through her creative art.
And maybe more than any of that, we honor her for telling us with her life that people survive. That people survive periods of struggle and nationalism. That people survive personal turmoil and illness and pain. That people survive and thrive after forces aim to imprison or restrict freedoms, restrict freedoms or ban books, or make some of us illegal. “People survive,” she says. They survive because they don’t get silent in the face of forces that want to turn back the clock or remove rights. They survive because they believe more strongly in the future than the cynical do.
In a sense, this is her lesson for faith for us. She believes as we do that people survive. Like the poet Ada Limon says with her poem, “Remember the trees bloom new leaves each year.” Instructions for Not Giving Up says, “Whatever winter did to us, we must return to the strange idea of continuous living. The mess of us, the hurt, the empty, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm.”
The teacher I visited in China, the one I told you about earlier, who limped badly from her healed femur and cried in my presence in her kitchen telling me stories of how she survived the Cultural Revolution, looked at me in that day in 1991 without saying it out loud said, “We survived, and it matters.” I happened to have been reading Ralph Ellison’s book Invisible Man on that journey through China in 1991. Ellison in it and has his lead character say, “I am invisible. Understand simply because people refuse to see me. But life is to be lived, not controlled. And humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.”
The teacher asked me if she could have that book, something no one in that era in China would’ve had access to. So I left it with her on her kitchen table when I said goodbye. I like to think that somewhere in China in 1991, a book of resistance, of a story that demands the refusal to be silenced or erased was in the hands of courageous people ready to raise a new generation of creative and bold young Chinese. I don’t know if it had that impact, but I know it might have. And sometimes, that’s all we can do. When the world is careening toward its own destruction, all we can do is stand firm and speak the truth and not forget and not let forces of evil turn us on one another, and make small acts of kindness and compassion. Stand up in resistance to conformity. Sometimes, all we can do is to name those who came before with dignity and courage who survived so much. Amen.
