Hung Liu’s Color Only Adds To Starkness Of Dorothea Lange Images

[...] in the translation, Hung Liu is able to bring unique empathy to Lange’s Dust Bowl images, having spent four years working the fields during the Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic of China. Liu’s eastward migration meets Lange’s westward migration in the exhibition “Promised Land,” which opens Saturday, April 29, at Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Project. To render 12 of Lange’s photographs into paintings took two years and enough emotional energy that Liu did not even attempt to start it until she had retired from the faculty at Mills College in Oakland, where she taught studio arts for 24 years. At 69, Liu has lived in California longer than she lived in China, but she still speaks with a Mandarin accent, and it doesn’t take too much prodding to get her back to the day that the soldiers came and took her away. [...] after her father, who had been an officer in the national army, was arrested and sent off to prison as part of the purge, Liu — the only child — was sent for proletarian re-education in a country village. A table is papered with catalogs from her exhibitions nationwide, mostly portraits of “Chinese refugees and laborers,” she says. To approach the Lange portfolio, Liu went to the Oakland Museum of California, which holds the Dorothea Lange Archive of 6,000 prints and 25,000 negatives. Once Liu discovered the archive, she came back a dozen times or more to go through 78 chronological volumes of proof sheets, says Drew Johnson, OMCA’s Curator of Photography and Visual Culture. [...] a photograph of a girl sitting in a tire in front of a depressing shack might have the shack replaced with ribbons of color. [...] that is the rare urban scene; most of her works are set in migrant camps, out in the bleak landscape. “In this body of work you can see the colorful lines,” she says, pointing out details like the barbed wire on a fence or women stooping over laundry, or the way hunger looks on all the gaunt faces.