Artwork Description
Hung Liu – High Plains- Gold
Dimensions: 32 x 31″ paper / 26 x 26″ plate
Year: 2020
Medium: archival pigment print
with metal leaf and
handwork
Edition: 5/9
She gazes out at the landscape before her, squinting into the sun. Liu emphasizes the brightness of the scene with the gold leaf background, creating the sense of a luminous sunset over the dry, flat landscape. In this print, Liu captures an intimate moment. The work suggests that even in the face of new horizons, humans still possess the capacity to care for other beings with empathy and compassion.
Hung Liu first discovered the Dorothea Lange photographic archive in 2015. She immediately became fascinated by the struggles of the migrants in Lange’s Dust Bowl Era photographs. Liu is empathetic because like them, Hung Liu herself was forced to leave her home during the Cultural Revolution of her childhood in China. And ironically, like Dorothea Lange, Hung Liu used a camera (in Liu’s case a smuggled one) to document the struggles of the people she encountered during that time. This image shows Liu’s fascination with the way we care for one another, even when we can barely care for ourselves.
By Sally Sasz, Morehead-Cain Scholar, Art History/English student, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill