10 Chancery Lane Gallery is delighted to present the works of Chinese-American artist Hung Liu in her exhibition entitled, Prodigal Daughters.  Taking her inspiration from the 1949 film, Daughters of China, Liu reinterprets scenes from the black and white film in vivid color.  With intense thickly applied brush strokes, Liu paints ruddy earthen portraits with splashes of bright colors, these eight heroic women who chose to die rather than being captured by the Japanese.  In this series, Liu addresses and revisits the intensity and innocence of communist ideology and her development as a person and artist as a result of it.  The series of large works will be shown in Hong Kong for the first time.

Liu admits that as a child she was an enthusiastic believer of the Socialist utopian dream and grew up singing proudly the Internationale, the 1872 anthem written by Eugene Pottier for the proletariat masses.  Heroism, as seen in the 1949 film Daughters of China, was a strong influence on her and even today she says, "I admired heroes and wanted to be a tough solider.  Even today, when I'm wounded, I'd rather lick the blood and get back to work - like the women soldiers in Daughters of China, the 1949 propaganda film." The film had a significant impact on her, "I saw this film as a child in China, and it shaped my expectations of women as protagonists in the emerging socialist utopia. Of course, utopia never arrived, but a kind of hard won feminism stayed with me the rest of my life, and served me well in America."

With bold portraits juxtaposed with Chinese symbols, Hung Liu has much to say.  She often paints historical concepts that are layered with her trademark circles, Chinese cranes and dripping washes that frame her thickly painted brush strokes.  "The new paintings are my way of painting life back into my memories of a propaganda film that, over time, has become a document of the revolutionary sincerity that permeated my childhood."

Born in Manchuria in 1948 and raised in Beijing, Hung Liu grew up amongst the city's Communist elite, attending the same prestigious girls' boarding school as Mao's and Deng Xiaoping's daughters. She was re-educated during the Cultural Revolution working seven days a week in the countryside. She later studied art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and then at the University of California, San Diego where she received a degree in visual arts.  Her father had a difficult time in China being a captain of the Nationalist Army (the Kuomintang) and was sent to a labor camp.  Liu didn't see him again until she was 46.  She is now a tenured professor at Mills College where she teaches painting. 

Hung Liu has shown at museum exhibitions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The De Young Museum, San Francisco, the Kemper Museum, Kansas City, and others. Her works are part of the collections of the National Museum of American Art-the Smithonian, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The Los Angeles County Museum to name a few.  This is her first time in Hong Kong.