Dissident and Diasporic Memory in Liu Hung’s Self-Portraits

• In Event: Visualizing Indigenous, Black & Asian American Dissent

Abstract

Resident Alien (1988) and A Third World (1994) are two self-portraits created by Chinese-born American contemporary artists, Liu Hung. The former portrait addresses the marginalization of her racial and gender identity under the rubric of American immigration law. The latter portrays her female body what Liu calls as a site of confrontation between capitalist and communist ideologies. Specifically, the symbols of the landscape of San Francisco and Chairman Mao embody both Chinese immigration history and Liu’s memory of living in Mao’s China. The changes in the representation of her Chinese-ness in these two paintings demonstrate the ways in which Liu’s Chinese diasporic memory was complicated by the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests in addition to her immigration experience to the U.S.

To allude to the political context in which the above-mentioned changes were mobilized, this paper compares the respective reception of the two paintings. It emphasizes that the embrace of the latter painting coincided with American institutional recognition of overseas Chinese contemporary artists in 1990s. These artists at the time gained their reputation internationally as “dissidents” due to the alternative political agenda they imagined as opposed to Chinese government. I situate the wider attention Liu’s latter painting attracted within this historical moment and argue that the subsequent lionization of Liu in the U.S. served to assert the superiority of the capitalist liberalism over communism.

More specifically, considering that Liu as both a traditional American “dissident” being a woman artist of color and a transnational “dissident” protected by the U.S. in the name of western liberalism, this paper argues that Liu strategically played this double-identity card and utilized what Homi Bhahba terms as the “third space”, i.e. her “in-betweenness”, to disrupt the gender and racial hierarchy in American visual territory, as well as to unsettle the Chinese state power. On a larger scale, by tracing American’s changing perception of Liu from an alien other to a “freedom fighter”, this paper also sheds light on the ways in which U.S. prioritizes its national agenda above the domestic ones.

Author

• Guoqian Li, University of Hawai'i at Manoa