Hung Liu: Happy and Gay presents a selection of oil paintings and prints from a 2011-12 series by Hung Liu, the renowned Chinese American artist (born Changchun, China 1948 - died Oakland, California 2021). The images adapt and subvert Maoist propaganda cartoons that were published during the 1950s in small booklets for children in China. In the series, Liu revisits cartoons of her youth that were published in children’s books and primers (known as xiaorenshu).
Like the Dick and Jane readers circulating in the United States during the postwar era, the illustrations were used in China to socialize children by instilling values such as hard work, family unity, and patriotism. Liu’s reformulation of this palm-size historic childhood imagery into large-scale, richly-painted contemporary canvases not only turns mass-produced illustrations into paintings but also raises questions at the intersection of ideology, propaganda, and education. Liu invites viewers to think critically about the words and images that shape our collective identities, challenging us to reimagine them, a form of rewriting history. As she often said, “history is a verb. It is constantly flowing forward.
Hung Liu, "Heroine of Gu Yanxiu", 2012, Oil on canvas, Oakland Museum of California. Acquired through funds provided by the OMCA Art Guild and Judy and Bill Timken in honor of Karen Tsujimoto. © Hung Liu Estate
Jaynelle Hazard is the Director and Chief Curator of Georgetown University Art Galleries and an Associate Professor of the Practice in the Department of Art and Art History. Her career has been dedicated to amplifying diverse voices within the canon.
Before joining Georgetown, Hazard was the Executive Director and Chief Curator at Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art (Tephra ICA), where she led a significant rebranding effort and expanded the institution’s reach, impact, and strategic initiatives.
She was previously the Director of Exhibitions at Workhouse Arts Center and worked with celebrated artworks during her time supporting the corporate contemporary art collection at UBS and at Blank Projects gallery in Cape Town, South Africa.
Dorothy Moss is the Founding Director of the Hung Liu Estate. From 2011-2023, Moss held the position of curator of painting and sculpture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery. During her tenure at the Smithsonian, she was a leader of the Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative, serving as coordinating curator of the Initiative from 2018-2021.
In 2015 Moss initiated the National Portrait Gallery's first performance art series, IDENTIFY, where she commissioned new performances by renowned artists including James Luna, Maria Magdalena Campos Pons, Jeffrey Gibson, Lee Mingwei with Leslie Urena, and Maren Hassinger with Charlotte Ickes. From 2013-2019 Moss directed the Portrait Gallery’s triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition.
As curator of painting and sculpture she oversaw prominent commissions of portraits of women subjects by women artists, including Amy Sherald's portrait of Michelle Obama and Karin Sander’s portrait of Maya Lin, among others.