Last week I went to the Hung Liu exhibit at the La Salle University Art Museum (press announcement here). It was amazing to see the print Winter Blossom (that I wrote about last year) in person. The only other woodcut in the show was this portrait, which explains why I'm writing about a piece titled Midsummer in chilly November. (It also helps that the color scheme in this image reminds me more of autumn than summer, the pink blossoms notwithstanding).
Her eyes smile, and she seems to know something, possess some leverage. Her face glows and peers through a veil of rain and whispers. Everything else fades like a ghost or dissolves like sugar, but her face remains solid, colorful, lively. A breathing statue. An immortal angel blowing us a kiss.
Hung Liu says of her portraits such as this:
"I am looking for the mythic pose beneath the historical figure -- and the painting beneath the photograph."
If you want to see the show (and if you can, you should!) it's up until December 5th.
Also, there is a bit more information about Liu's unique printmaking process for making a woodcut at Magnolia Editions, here.
This is a woodcut of sorts. The artist Hung Liu doesn't make woodcuts in any traditional way. Her process used for this image is described on Magnolia Editions Blog:
"Winter Blossom is a hybrid of two processes, incorporating both traditional and unorthodox printmaking techniques. The image was first cut into a block of wood using a laser, after which further edits were hand-carved by Hung Liu. The woodcut was printed on a Takach etching press using traditional black relief ink; all of the colors in each print (digitally manipulated by the artist) were then registered and printed using a UV-cured acrylic inkjet printer."
This combination of ancient craft and modern, digital technology comes through in the final image. The vertical, green lines behind the portrait remind me of both wood grain and lines of code from The Matrix. The pink flowers that bloom from a gnarly tree branch refer to beauty in nature, and yet they scream urban graffiti through the skilled-yet-hasty way they are rendered.
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| Photograph of Zhen Fei |
The branch and blossoms slither and drip ominously around portrait of Zhen Fei. We see only the face of the legendary concubine, reproduced from a century-old photograph. The garish colors and hidden costume transform her from a mere historical figure to a modern and confrontational presence. She looks directly at us, and yet her face seems impersonal, like a mask. Her silent, doll eyes taunt, reminding us of everything we don't know and will never find out.
