Monday, August 30, 2010

Hung Liu at Byron Cohen Gallery

Hung Liu - Mourning: Crow, 2009
oil on canvas, 24 x 48 in.

"Hung Liu: New Works" opens this Friday, September 3 and runs until October 30 at Byron C. Cohen Gallery for Contemporary Art in Kansas City.

The show features mixed media works and a recent suite of oil paintings. Xiao Yi writes:
Liu has devoted herself to a series of paintings depicting people in the aftermath of the Sichuan quake. The subject of these paintings is less the disaster itself than the expressions of mythic emotion embodied in the poses of the dead and the survivors: the contortions of grief, shock, confusion, stunned silence, courage, and mourning.

[...]As an artist, Liu has always been interested in "mythic poses" in which the human figure expresses the epic themes and historical forces that rumble through our lives - sometimes ending them, or leaving us bereft. The body tells its stories, and Liu's career as a painter has pivoted, ironically, on the photographic depictions of the narratives bound up or expressed in the poses of ordinary Chinese people caught up in extraordinary historical circumstances.
Work by Hung Liu at Magnolia Editions

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