Title: Mu Nu (Mother and Daughter)
Artist: Hung Lui
Medium: Oil on Canvas

Description

I chose to write about Hung Liu, Mu Nu (Mother and Daughter). The painting by Hung Lui in 1997; Liu used oil on canvas as her medium. The result is a timeless 80 x 140 inch by inch painting that is currently housed in Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum. The roughly 7 by 11 foot painting shows two women hunched over, ropes tied around their waist, strain on hands and knees to pull a heavy load. The point of this searing image, which calls to mind slavery and extreme poverty, is that they’re performing the labor of oxen or machines. The lack of shoes, tools, and simple cloths reinforce the depiction of poverty. The negative space is filled with a large, ghostly looking, shallow body of water and a crowd of earthy colored rocks.

Analysis

From experiences in China, starting at the age of five, Hung Liu used memories, sketches, and photos to create this figurative oil painting. Painted from a photo, the two women are depicted in washed-out grays; she uses shades of gray for the mother and darker more predominant colors for the clothing and skin of the daughter. While the background landscape contains more vibrant colors. She uses horizontal lines to create a pattern of continuation or beginning to end of a rock path. Rocks, water, as well as the mother to daughter stretching left to right on the canvas. There is also a rhythm of moving forward created by the raise of their hands and legs. This rhythm and shadowing of the water produces a focal point that grabs your attention.

Interpretation

The artist's works reveal a deep compassion for the victims of history. The viewer feels the suffering that has characterized the social, political, and industrial developmental growth of the people of China in the past. The line attaching the mother and the daughter represents that the future is always connected to the past. I believe that the light used in the painting, points to change, however slow.