Music of the Great Earth: Hung Liu at Pie Projects

Music of the Great Earth: Hung Liu at Pie Projects

August 21 – September 11, 2021

 Hung Liu at Pie Projects, July 2021 

Beloved Chinese-born American painter Hung Liu passed away on August 7th. Diagnosed just a month earlier with pancreatic cancer, she left with tremendous courage and grace. Her spirit will keep shining through her art, which she always saw as bigger than herself. We are heartbroken, and honored to celebrate one of history’s most remarkable humanist artists with the upcoming exhibition Music of the Great Earth: Hung Liu at Pie Projects.

The exhibition, curated by Turner Carroll Gallery, showcased rare large masterworks by Hung Liu, and coincided with Hung Liu: Sanctuary that showed at Turner Carroll from August 20th to September 19th.

Hung Liu: Sanctuary and Music of the Great Earth: Hung Liu at Pie Projects opened just a month after Hung’s solo exhibition Golden Gate opened at the de Young Museum, and the same month as her major retrospective Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery.

Dorothy Moss, curator at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, named Hung Liu as one of the three most influential artists of the last 100 years in an article published in Artnet News for her “commitment to complicating the dominant narratives of history and making absence visible through work that is both searing and transcendent.”

Hung Liu, Music of the Great Earth II, 2008, 80 x 480 x 4″, mixed media on panels (detail)

Included in the exhibition was Hung Liu's monumental painting Music of the Great Earth II. Music of the Great Earth was Liu’s first and most important mural in China. It was located in the Central Academy of Art in Beijing, and was seen through the decades by all the greatest Chinese art students. Liu studied ancient Chinese cave murals as her source material for this imagery. When the 2008 Olympics were to be held in Beijing, the Chinese government invited Liu back to China at its “Prodigal Daughter.” Because the building that housed the mural had been torn down, Liu chose to recreate it in a contemporary manner in both print and monumental painted form.

Liu’s work is held in the collections of museums including SF MoMA in San Francisco; the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both in New York; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

View select artwork below.

Inquire about available artwork.  

Hung Liu, Blue Moon, 2019, 36 x 62", oil on canvas

Hung Liu, For the Struggle Carries On, 2009, 36 x 36″, oil on canvas

Hung Liu, Tis the Final Conflict V, 2007, 60 x 72″, oil on canvas

 Hung Liu, Mu Gung Hwa (Korean Comfort Woman), 2003-10, 48 x 54″, oil on canvas