Schneider Museum of Art
Chinese man with an apron
Hung Liu "Chinese In Idaho,
Portrait No. 2"
Polly Bemis and horses
Hung Liu "Polly Bemis, 2004"
The Vanishing (continued: Page 3)
The Idaho Chinese Portraits
Hung Liu’s Idaho Chinese portraits, begun at the invitation of the Sun Valley Center for the Arts, portray Chinese residents of Idaho from photographs taken during the 19th century, when tens of thousands of Chinese migrated from California in search of gold into the West’s mining districts. The most prominent of Idaho’s residents was Polly Bemis, a slave girl from China who came to America as a prostitute, was won in a bet by an Idaho miner, and in time became a prosperous independent landowner and civic leader. In fact, Liu has painted her twice: once in a large centerpiece canvas (“Polly”) and again in a smaller flanking panel—one in four in which otherwise anonymous individuals are depicted. The effect is to position Bemis as a kind of Goddess figure flanked as if by seraphim, including the one “ghost” image of Bemis herself. The remaining figures—a woman attending a funeral near Hailey, a laundry worker, a cook standing outside his kitchen—round out the suite, each canvas a unique portrait of a common person lost to time but captured in the chemical emulsions of 19th century photography.
In Liu’s painting, the images that haunted thin chemical layers are embodied anew as a mineral mix of fine ground powders, viscous latherings, quick calligraphic asides, hues both tepid and ebullient, and runnels, furrows, and drips formed by luxuriant veils of linseed oil that threaten to wash the images—the past, indeed the painting—away. This is the fresh, luscious poetry of the “mineral period” (painting) as it presses against the dry atrophied plates of the “chemical period” (photography)—a postmodern reversal sans irony, in which an older medium reaches “back” to enliven a newer one.
By 1889 most of the Chinese had been driven from the Wood River Valley, so they remain for us now mostly as images in historical society archives. They remain for us as ghosts. It is safe to speculate that most of those photographed never saw the pictures taken of them; it was the whites, after all, who were “capturing” the images of these exotic foreign migrants. A century and a quarter later, with nearly all traces of the Chinese miners gone, it isn’t simply the resurrection of these old photographs that matters, but Liu’s turning them into a different form of matter. It is as if the paintings summon people from images, conjure color from gray tones, or open images—from the surfaces of primitive photography. Out of this alchemy emerges a past with color and skin and heart that matters anew.
Perhaps it is helpful to think of photographs as fields. Not only visual fields, but as memorial acreage that occupies our cultural (sub) consciousness. In her famous 1977 essay “The Image World,” Susan Sontag wrote of photographs as sacramental relics of photochemical traces of a moment. Today, we think of images—not only photographic images—as retinal mirages that comprise the postmodern shadow play dancing across our walls. In her thinking, Sontag did not detach the image from the photograph, seeing the photograph as a tribal, talismanic object in a modern, secular world. Seeing it, indeed, as a slice of “the real. Having been exposed to the light of an instant, a photograph carries the imprint of that exposure through times as if “a piece of the true cross.”
But even pieces of the true cross need restoration to bring them back into sensual accord with our curious eyes and caressing hands. One might say that Liu restores old photographs with (and as) new paintings. She doesn’t just “cite” them as sources, but revives them by drawing forth their narrative dimension. She doesn’t necessarily know the stories of the individuals whose faces and poses she paints, but in painting them she opens the photographic image, ever fixed in its chemical moment, to a slower kind of looking.
Since the photographs Liu paints from tend to be old and faded, the looking required to make sense of them, and to turn their imagery into paintings, is more intense then the casual glances by which we regard most photographs. It is arguably more intense than was the photographer’s own looking.
Interestingly, Liu’s best paintings often come from the worst photographs. The low-resolution gray-tone images that coat the surfaces of 19th century photographs are like depleted tailings that can be sifted once again by patient hands. Any image in any medium gives up only what we coax from it. By subjecting those images to the scrutiny of a painter looking for a good painting, Liu can skim “color” from faded photographs. It is no coincidence that this was also the kind of mining the Chinese in Idaho did—resurrecting claims that had been dismissed or abandoned by the white miners.
The Vanishing Page 1 The Vanishing Page 2 (Rene Yung)
The Vanishing Page 4 (Hung Liu continued) The Vanishing Page 5 (Peter Britt)
The Vanishing Page 6 (More about Peter Britt)
