Schneider Museum of Art
Polly Bemis standing
Hung Liu "Chinese In Idaho,
Portrait No. 1" (Polly Bemis)
The Vanishing (continued: Page 4)
The Idaho Chinese Portraits (continued)
At the same time, Liu’s paintings are just as fleeting, in their own way, as are the photographs they reclaim. Polly Bemis, the cook, the launderer, the mourning woman—these photographic subjects are not etched in realism; they are not washed of their ambiguity, but are awash in it. Richly embodied as paint, they nonetheless dissolve into passages of mineral abstraction or drain away like wet powder. Liu’s hands seem both to paint and un-paint her subjects. Throughout her career, much of the meaning of her paintings has come from the way the washes and drips dissolve the photo-based images, opening them to the slower process of painting, suggesting—perhaps liberating—the cultural and personal narratives fixed in the photographic instant.
Over the years, Liu has painted traditional Chinese painting motifs into her photo-based fields. These include images of birds, flowers, stamps, and landscapes, among others, all borrowed from Chinese art history and worked into the paintings. The traditional motifs evoke a sense of the cultural memory underlying the surfaces of history. Just so, in Chinese in Idaho Portraits, Liu has added butterflies, fruit, flowers (a “Buddha’s Hand,” which is a citrus fruit), and a flying seraph (fei tian) whose origin traces back to a 14th century Taoist temple mural (painted on the north wall of the Yoong Le Palace). The seraph, aloft in stylized bands of clouds with garments aflutter, sweeps down across the central Polly Bemis painting, left to right, like a Pacific weather front—not a threatening storm, but a welcoming rain. She holds a potted plant like an offering of fecundity as she drifts, one imagines, across the western states toward Idaho. Liu’s use of her as a kind of psychic atmosphere enveloping Polly Bemis suggests the eastward surge of Chinese immigration after the California gold fields were declared off-limits to Chinese miners. Americans tend to think of the “settlement” of the West as a westward migration; for the Chinese, that surge was eastward (often not by choice), ending in, among other places, Idaho’s Wood River Valley.
In the painting, Polly, holding two brown horses, anchors the seraph’s breeziness with a stout body and an aging, earthen face. Standing her ground, she was an Idahoan by the time her picture was taken, with no thought of returning to China. In Liu’s painting, China, in the form of the 14th century Taoist seraph, is, however, returning to her.
And yet, the seraph, the way Liu paints it, is a cultural hybrid that bespeaks Polly’s identity as an immigrant (as well as Liu’s). While based on a photograph of its ancient Chinese source, the seraph is also inspired by a painting done in 1974 of the same subject by Frances Wolfson, a native of Florida who took up the study of Chinese-style painting late in life.
Beginning in 1962, Wolfson dedicated herself to the practice of painting birds and flowers, landscapes, fruit, animals, and seasonal scenes using techniques learned from her Chinese painting teachers in Florida, who themselves had copied ancient works and motifs. Thus, her painting of the seraph, called “Goddess of Plants,” was already several generations removed from its 14th century source. Indeed, the face of Wolfson’s goddess, with its precise lines, mannered neck, smooth features and blush cheeks, is a world away from the round face “full moon” beauties that typified the late-Tang style of the Yuan Dynasty, which is when the Yoong Le Palace mural was painted. Which is to say, Wolfson’s goddess has the confident grace of a modern woman, circa 1960’s, and the creamy face of an Asian-Caucasian: she is a hybrid.
In the four smaller paintings Liu has seeded flowers, fruit, and insects plucked randomly from Wolfson’s body of Chinese-style paintings, further germinating the painting surface in a cross-pollination of images, styles, media, and cultural sources. Liu’s collage-like use of these mostly biological and botanical images, which are themselves hybrids of countless generations of copies, is a metaphor of the way in which her Chinese subjects in the small paintings—the second Polly, the cook, the laundry man, the mourning woman—have morphed over time and history.
In their actual lives, the Chinese who came here were changed by the American West, which they helped change in turn. We can see their contribution now, from the distance of a century or more—but they are all gone. Polly Bemis was the exception; she stayed and by staying, became American. Most of her fellow pioneers didn’t want to stay, preferring instead to get rich and go home, but many would undoubtedly have put down roots if they had been allowed. Today they remain for us only as images in photographic archives. On the face of it, this might seem a sad end—until one remembers that in the 21st century images are our most valuable currency. As Sontag again reminds us: a “society becomes modern when one of its chief activities is the production and consumption of images.” In this respect, the images “captured” long ago of the West’s Chinese come back to us now as if gold recovered through a kind of retort process in which chemical images are heated in the mineral amalgam of Hung Liu’s painting to extract the psychic ore of history. If these Chinese are not allowed to be Americans then, their images are part of America now.
Jeff Kelley, Oakland California, June 2004
The Vanishing Page 1 The Vanishing Page 2 (Rene Yung)
The Vanishing Page 3 (Hung Liu) The Vanishing Page 5 (Peter Britt)
The Vanishing Page 6 (More about Peter Britt)
