Women Off Color

Hung Liu was a Chinese artist and art professor who established a successful career in the United States. Best known for her large-scale figurative paintings inspired by Chinese and American photography of the late 19th - early 20th centuries, she also worked in mixed media and installation.
Liu’s mission as artist was to tell the history that remains untold yet defines present-day society, give voice to invisible people from the bottom of society, be it laborers in the rural areas of the American West or Chinese people photographed by foreigners.
Women Off Color features three young Chinese women whose photos came from an early-20th-century photo-album of women available for sale to overseas brothels. Liu tinted the portraits in the primary colors instead of their original black-and-white state. She included a papier-mâché fortune cookie below each portrait complete with a slip of paper with a wisdom message. Written in ancient Chinese characters, the messages actually describe women in perjorative terms.
The artist stated: "I turn old photographs into new paintings. The photographs I work from are usually of Chinese subjects from the 19th and 20th centuries, including images of young Chinese prostitutes posing for the camera, soldiers, famine and war refugees, child street acrobats, Qing Dynasty courtesans and laborers, usually women. In these images I am looking for the mythic pose beneath the historical figure, the elemental human conditions of working, eating, fleeing, dying, and posing. I also weave passages of traditional Chinese art into my paintings, hoping to stir up their surfaces with stylistic contrasts and awaken a deeper sense of the cultural memory underlying the spectacle of modern Chinese history."