Artwork Description
Hung Liu – Golden Lotus
Dimensions: 48 x 56″
Year: 1990
Medium: oil and silk on canvas (diptych)
(C) Hung Liu Estate/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York
When Hung Liu was a youth, she was removed from school and sent to the Chinese countryside to labor as part of her “re-education” during the Cultural Revolution. The small image in the viewer’s left panel of the Golden Lotus, Red Flag diptych is a painted version of one of Liu’s few photographs of her young self. Carrying a gun, standing in the fields, this image served as an aspirational image for Liu, showing the social justice warrior she would become. The foreground depicts ballerinas, performing the famous pro-Mao ballet “Red Detachment of Women,” dressed as members of the Red Guard. While these women seem to be “modernized” in that they could wield arms and protect their homeland, Liu draws a subtle comparison to the limited individual freedom they actually experienced. The composition leads diagonally down to the lower corner of the left panel, onto the ballerina’s left foot. While the revolutionary ballerinas in might seem strong, their feet were bound in another way. Liu once told Tonya Turner Carroll that while the ballerinas looked like “modern” women, their toe shoes hobbled them and limited their movement similarly to foot binding. Liu was trying to present her opinion that even though China seemed to be offering “modernization” to women, there were still gender handicaps placed upon even the most “modernized.”
In contrast to the warrior panel in Golden Lotus, Red Flag, the other panel of the diptych depicts a woman whose feet had been bound. A common practice in historic China, foot binding essentially hobbled the woman to the extent that they had no ability to move quickly to defend themselves or to escape aggression. Liu placed a reproduction printed on silk of the original photograph of the woman, to indicate her preciousness.