Artwork Description
Hung Liu – The Fruits of Our Labor
Dimensions: 36 x 24″ finished size / 36 x 24″ unframed
Year: 2009
Medium: oil on canvas
Hung Liu’s The Fruits of Our Labor is part of a series of paintings Liu completed between 2007 and 2009, based on the Chinese social realist style in which she was trained in China. However, rather than making the heroes of her paintings be men proclaiming the greatness of Chinese communism, Liu’s heroes were primarily women–strong women who braved the hardships of labor and poverty, yet managed to carry on.
Liu’s paintings are in collections of more than 50 museums internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMoMA, et al. Her greatly anticipated retrospective at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery opening date=May 21, 2021.
-Tonya Turner Carroll