ABOUT THE ART

Hung Liu’s Miss Fortune is part of a portfolio titled 10 x 10: Ten Women Ten Prints, produced in 1995 by the Berkeley Art Center and Alliance Graphics to celebrate International Women’s Day and seventy-five years of women’s suffrage. In this work, Hung Liu explores feminine sexuality, the condition of women, and myths of immigration. Using a photograph of a child prostitute taken in China at the turn of the twentieth century, Liu manipulates the image to duplicate the child. The child gazes directly but passively at the viewer, suggesting the inequities in power relationships between genders and races that transcend time, place, and social position.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Hung Liu was born in 1948 in Changchun, China. As Communist forces began taking over, Liu’s family was caught in the turmoil and her father was detained by Communist troops. She did not see him again until 1994. Liu taught and studied art in China and was accepted to the University of California, San Diego in 1981 but could not come to the United States until 1984. Her art is concerned with social views, race, sex, and gender. She often incorporates images that were mass-produced during the Cultural Revolution in China to explore the inherent power of visual imagery to shape society.