Hung Liu - Statement
My work of the past several years has a lot to do with late-19th and early-20th century photographs. In general, the photographs are of two kinds: The first kind were taken by foreign tourists in China, and the second by Chinese of themselves: specifically, of young prostitutes who were for sale. Together, these photographic bodies testify to a kind of split perception of a nation, both from without and within. They represent the way Chinese were seen from the West, and the way such a perception was internalized by the Chinese themselves. The motifs they share, which go hand-in-hand, are exoticism and patriarchal domination.
Between 1860 and 1912, foreign tourists photographed the Chinese in China. Their subjects included women with bound-feet, dead Chinese soldiers (who were killed in fighting with European troops), and Allied armies entering the Forbidden City. Because they were published in the West, they have never been seen in China. As a body, these photographs are evidence of cultural invasion, Western voyeurism, and early forms of the media representation of exotic "others." Not merely a record of the past, these photographs are also a clear esthetic statement and a subjective cultural choice.
The second body of photographs, which I researched last summer in a Beijing film archive (where they were stored in order to save them from the book-burnings of the Cultural Revolution), are taken of young Chinese prostitutes who are being displayed in a photo-studio setting like products in a mail-order catalogue. Unlike the pictures taken by tourists and journalists, these turn-of-the-century images were taken by Chinese of Chinese, but with cameras imported from the West and in photo-studios that were designed to associate the women with works of European art, culture, and technology. In poses that still resonate with today's advertising strategies, young women were shown reclining on a Victorian couch, driving a car, making a telephone call, rowing a boat, holding a statue of a Caucasian child, and so forth. The equation is always the same: woman to object. In this way, the prostitutes were made to appeal to the customer's desire to associate himself with the accoutrements of Western civilization.
With these photographs, which have rarely--if ever--been seen in the West, and which haven't been seen in China since at least the Communist Revolution, Chinese men adapted the lenses of the West for the purpose of selling their own young women. None of the women had real names. What remains of their identities are professional names, such as "Little White Lotus," or "Sweet Orchid." If Europeans trained their cameras on the exotic East, the Chinese turned those same cameras back on themselves. The more I study the photographs, the more evidence of Euro-centric esthetic influence in Chinese modern culture I discover. As an artist, I try to represent that evidence in my work.
With these images, I am exploring the questions of personal and national
identity as they drift across the concepts and experiences of "homeland"
and "new home." A photograph is always taken under certain conditions:
it is site-specific and time-bound. It is involved in a sophisticated kind
of storage called memory. Over time, the lack of documented background information
about a photograph, its changes in terms of value and interest, and even
its natural chemical decay, add to it a blurred and mysterious veil. A unique
document can become a generic sign. All the generic signs together create
a collective bias, a cultural stereotype for both insiders and outsiders.
I am especially interested in the larger ideas of identity that might be
suggested in photographs whose subjects are anonymous, lost, without identity,
and in transition between two times and two places. For me, these two photograph
bodies reinforce that sense of transition. I also hope they will contribute
to the question of identity for other Asian-American artists as well.