Hung Liu: Golden Gate

The personal history of Hung Liu (b. 1948, Changchun, China) anchors Hung Liu: Golden Gate, an installation inspired by migrants who, like the artist herself, came to California and became an indelible part of its history, society, and culture. In a reimagining of her pivotal 1988 painting Resident Alien, Liu suggests the fragility of her status as an immigrant and the tenuous nature of assimilation through a creative interpretation of her own green card. Above the red-tinted category of class appears “CR6,” a designation that denotes having to reapply for permanent residency every two years. In place of her name, Liu inserts “Cookie, Fortune”—“Cookie” being an American slang term that was used for women in the mid-twentieth century. In taking on this name, Liu identifies with a prior wave of Chinese immigrants, women in particular. She also transcribes her birthdate, 1948, to 1984, the year she arrived in America. Emphasizing this transhistorical solidarity, Chinese Shrimp Junk II (1994), a large canvas shaped as a fishing boat, captures an image representative of and iconic to the history of Chinese migrants in the Bay Area. At the early twentieth-century height of the shrimping industry, as many as forty such junks could be seen fishing in the San Francisco Bay, and along with the Chinese fishing villages around San Francisco’s Hunters Point, these junks represent a vital but often erased part of this history. In addition, Liu’s paintings of Dust Bowl refugees—based on images b y documentary photographer Dorothea Lange—weave together the history of Chinese Americans with a larger narrative of California migration. Hung Liu: Golden Gate serves as a reminder that immigrants’ stories are at the very heart of our shared history as Americans.

Unless otherwise noted, all works are by Hung Liu and courtesy of the artist and Jeff Kelley