Chinese-American Artist Hung Liu to Visit UW April 17-18

Chinese-American artist Hung Liu will visit the University of Wyoming April 17-18.

A free public art talk featuring Liu will take place in Room 111 of the UW Visual Arts Building Monday, April 17, from 7-8 p.m. A gallery walk-through of the exhibition “Hung Liu: American Exodus” will occur Tuesday, April 18, from 10:30-11:30 a.m. at the UW Art Museum.

“Hung Liu: American Exodus” presents new work by the artist, well-known for her large-scale paintings based on photographic archives. “American Exodus” is inspired by the Dust Bowl-era photographs by American photographer Dorothea Lange made under the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s.

For Liu, whose photographic references are primarily those of her family or cultural life in China, working from an American photographer’s perspective on a period of great strife in the U.S. fostered universal connections between the struggles of those displaced by political or natural forces and the underlying humanity and dignity that pervade. The exhibition will be on view through Aug. 12.

Liu has an extensive international exhibition history and is represented in major museum collections nationwide. She was born in Changchun, China, and lived through the Maoist era before immigrating to the U.S. in 1984. She lives and works in Oakland, Calif.

The UW Art Museum presented her work in 2006 in “Hung Liu and Rene Yung: The Vanishing: Re-presenting the Chinese in the American West,” for which Liu used photographic references of the Chinese in Wyoming from the American Heritage Center.

For more information about the Art Museum, call (307) 766-6622, visit the website at www.uwyo.edu/artmuseum, or follow the museum on Facebook.

Through its “Museum as Classroom” approach, the UW Art Museum places art at the center of learning for all ages. Located in the Centennial Complex at 2111 Willett Drive in Laramie, the museum is open Mondays through Saturdays from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday hours are extended to 7 p.m. February through April and September through November. Admission is free.