Butterfly Dreams: Thinking, 2011

ed. 6/20

Seven color lithography with gold leaf

44.25 x 30.5 in. (print)

Frame courtesy of Mark Ryan Fine Art Services

Chinese-born American artist Hung Liu (Born in Changchun, China, 1948 - 2021) portrayed individuals who risked being forgotten in death as in life. As a child, Liu lived under the regime of Mao Zedong, who led the Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution (1966 - 1976), a turbulent period of political and social upheaval in the People's Republic of China. It was during this time that Liu realized photography's significance when she witnessed her mother burn cherished family photographs, or otherwise risk persecution for being "bourgeois," or not working class.

As an adult, Liu immigrated to the United States, where she focused on the photographs of the Chinese people who came before her. Whether painting or printing, by manipulating and recontextualizing found images by dripping, splattering, and layering materials, Liu blurred the lines between representation and abstraction and probed photography's role in shaping collective memory.

In 2011, Hung Liu worked from her grandfather's photographs of Chinese monks, to create a dynamic series of prints at Tamarind entitled Butterfly Dreams.