Hung Liu: Happy and Gay

Spring 2025

Georgetown de la Cruz Gallery

From 2011-2012, renowned Chinese American artist Hung Liu (born Changchun, China 1948 - died Oakland, California 2021) created a series of paintings and works on paper titled Happy and Gay. In the 2024 fall semester, former Smithsonian curator and Director of the Hung Liu Estate, Dr. Dorothy Moss, will teach an Art History/Museum Studies seminar at Georgetown focused on Hung Liu’s life and work that will lead to a student- curated exhibition of Liu's Happy & Gay series at the Maria and Alberto de la Cruz Art Gallery.

This fascinating and little-studied series comprises oils on canvas with installation elements and works on paper. The series is based on Maoist propaganda cartoons that were published during the 1950s and 1960s in small booklets for children in China with a title that comes from a school exercise for children learning English: “Come boys and girls—let’s sing let’s dance. We are happy and gay. It’s our National Day.” Like the Dick and Jane books circulating in the United States in the 1940s through the 1960s, the illustrations were used to teach normative values such as hard work, family unity, and patriotism.

With Happy & Gay, Liu resurrects and subverts the images of her youth with subtle irony. Her formal choices, including replacing primary colors with pastels and employing scale to expose the power of propaganda, speaks to Liu’s conviction that “History is a verb.” A peer of artists Carrie Mae Weems, Dawoud Bey, Enrique Chagoya, and Amalia Mesa Bains, whose work reinserts buried histories into museum spaces, Liu often discussed her artmaking practice as “rewriting history.” In the paintings, Liu revisits the indoctrination of her education in China during the Cultural Revolution through recreations of pages from primers as well as depictions of her local street readers – public book stands where children could rent booklets to read on the premises. Among the paintings in Happy and Gay, and a frequent visual device in Liu's works, are lush details of animals and mythical landscapes which, along with the social realist images and those of literary figures such as Mulan, reveal Liu's attempt to ameliorate pointed political content or issues of social inequality with natural or supernatural beauty. Liu's depiction of the many disparities in real life, fiction, fantasy, and history provide the dynamic tension in much of her work. In these paintings, she negotiates her way between a personal history that embraces larger social issues and confirms the potential of art to confront, comment, and comfort.

Exhibition curated by Dr. Dorothy Moss.