#aapi artist
If you were waiting for these, my LE white-lipped python stickers are available now! ♡
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Tala the uromastyx with hibiscus and succulents For Raven.
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ALTIn memory of Hung Liu who passed away last August and in honor of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
Hung Liu was a Chinese American artist who once said her goal was “to invent a way of allowing myself to practice as a Chinese artist outside of a Chinese culture.”
Liu was born in 1948 during the revolutionary era in Changchun in northeast China,. Her father was a teacher imprisoned for his involvement in anti-Communist politics. During the Cultural Revolution, she was sent by the government to the countryside to work on farms for “re-education.”
In the 1970s, Liu studied at Beijing Teachers College and Central Academy of Fine Arts, and earned a graduate degree in 1981. But she grew restless with the officially-sanctioned Socialist Realist style and subjects. In 1984, she was given a permission to travel to the United States and enrolled in the MFA program at the University of California, San Diego.
Liu settled permanently in the Bay Area. She started teaching at Mills College in Oakland in 1990, eventually retiring in 2014.
Her death in August 2021 came less than three weeks before the scheduled opening of a career survey, “Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands,” at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. She was the first Asian American woman to have a solo exhibition there.
Her work incorporated photo-based images that combined the political and the personal. Many of these images were of figures forgotten by history such as laborers, immigrants, prisoners, and prostitutes. (From “Hung Liu, Artist Who Blended East and West, Is Dead at 73” by Holland Cotter, The New York Times, August 22, 2021)
Image: “Sister Hoods”, 2003, Oil on canvas, 72”x 72”
Summoning ghosts : the art of Hung Liu
Oakland Museum of California.
Liu, Hung, 1948-2021
招魂
Berkeley : University Of California Press, 2013.
216 p. : ill. ; 28 cm.
English
2013.
HOLLIS number: 990136645170203941
I spent a long time trying to figure out how to express what I was feeling during the recent spike in Asian hate crimes. It’s been exhausting and frustrating being reminded of the conditional acceptance of Asian people in western society. Model monitory until something like covid comes along. The more I saw the events of the past year unfold, the more I realize that we are loved for our culture but it doesn’t necessarily apply to our people.
I started to reflect on my own personal experiences with racism, fetishization and growing up with internalized racism.
“All guys should just date a nice Asian girl”
“Omg you’re so Asian”
“Go back where you came from”
“Can you dress up as an asian school girl, I think that’d be really hot”
“Having asian media representation isn’t important. I also never saw anyone who looked like me on tv when I was growing up, so it doesn’t matter” - a white cis gender male
“I’d offer some to you but it’s not dog meat so you wouldn’t like it”
“I only watch Asian porn”
“Is your vagina slanted too?”
“I love Asian women, they’re so exotic but also obedient”
“Can you only speak mandarin to me during sex”
And those are just the verbal micro aggressions I’ve been told. I’m thankful I’ve never been physically assaulted.
From people getting spit on, robbed, stabbed, slashed, harassed, targeting the elderly, and then the shooting of 6 Asian women in Atlanta. I got tired of not being able to do anything. What could I really do for these victims but keep them in my thoughts and spread awareness. After the Atlanta shooting there were multiple gofundmes for the families of the victims and I didn’t feel like I was in a place where I could donate to all of them, enough to make an impact at least. So I spent a long time upset at myself that there was not a whole lot I could do. But then I had the idea that maybe I could create a charity product to raise money. So that’s where I am today. I have designed a pin where 100% of the profit will be set aside to support POC businesses, communities, and help victims of hate crimes. Link to the pin here
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