Artwork Description
Hung Liu – Father’s Arms
Dimensions: 35 x 27.75″ finished size
Year: 2016
Medium: six color lithograph
Edition: 25/40
Hung Liu-Father’s Arms is an image from Liu’s first body of work based upon American subject matter. Liu discovered Dorothea Lange’s Dust-Bowl era photography, and she immediately saw that Americans had experienced the same type of displacement and hardship as she had experienced in her native China during the rule of Chairman Mao and his Cultural Revolution. Though Father’s Arms is not an image based upon a Dorothea Lange photograph specifically, it is an image from that era of the 1930’s in America, when times were tough and compassion became a human necessity. As Liu says, when asked why she began depicting American subjects instead of her usual Chinese subjects, “We can adopt each other’s children, so why can’t we adopt each other’s ancestors?”
-Tonya Turner Carroll