Hung Liu
From Provisions
About the Artist
http://www.rfa.org/english/news/arts/2005/10/18/china_artist/
"Liu's blurred images echo the ambiguity and mystery of old black-and-white photographs, which 'maybe symbolizes what history, what memory is about,' the artist says. 'It's like a dissolution of memory.' ...The dripped paint 'creates a visual veil, like a filter. -- Some part (of the image) is in focus, some part is out of focus. I feel maybe it's about the stable part and the unstable part. Psychologically, there's a blurring.'"
--History Through the Veil of Memory, Jesse Hamlin, San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 7, 2000
"[The] overlay or weaving together of images from the ancient and modern past continues my interest in a contemporary form of history painting in which the images from one era witness and pass through those of another. An old lady sweeps rice from a railroad platform during a famine as sparrows pick branches for food. A cabal of birds from various dynasties connive and conspire on a network of branches like party functionaries engaged in endless, gossipy intrigue. A son leads his aging mother from the chaos of the Japanese occupation of Nanjing while behind them a red mural-like field of birds, Buddhist icons, and a miniature landscape replaces the devastation of the city they are fleeing with a tragic and pathetic hallucination of their cultural history. In these senses, the lasting effect of my new paintings is an underlying feeling of melancholy and lament in which history both repeats and forgets itself."
--from Artist Statement
More on Comfort Women
Recent developments: Z Magazine and New York Times
Comfort Women from Amnesty International
Survivors of the "comfort women" system are now elderly and unknown numbers have died, but many women have shown extreme courage in speaking out about their experiences and demanding justice.
Documentary photographs and advocacy resources from Comfort-Women.org
"It is indisputable that these women were forced, deceived, coerced and abducted to provide sexual services to the Japanese military ... [Japan] violated customary norms of international law concerning war crimes, crimes against humanity, slavery and the trafficking in women and children ... Japan should take full responsibility now, and make suitable restitution to the victims and their families."
International Commission of Jurists, November 1994
More Images from Hung Liu
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| Comfort Woman, 2001 | Comfort Woman, 2001 |
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| Comfort Woman, 2001 | Comfort Woman, 2001 |
