Reception: Thursday, April 15, 5:30 - 7:30PM

The Rena Bransten Gallery is proud to present Drawing from Life and Death, an exhibition of new works by Hung Liu. In a departure from her traditional referencing of historical photographs, this new body of work is comprised of paintings, drawings, and ceramic tiles that directly depict the dead - they are studies or contemplations of the ultimate still-life. Liu encountered her subjects, which had already crossed over to the "other side", on hikes near her Oakland home - two deer, a fawn - or, in the case of a Robin Red-Breast, the parking lot of her studio or on several visits to a local medical facility where she was invited to view human cadavers. These new subjects were studied, photographed from multiple angles, and rendered by hand; then juxtaposed with symbolic imagery - painted circles and ancient folkloric elements - in order to evoke the life cycle, the void, or the recycling of physical forms once spirits had departed. This methodology reaches back to Liu's classical training in China where artists were taught to draw from life, and continues her life-long interest in reclaiming ghosts from the past. Viewers are left in awe as they witness Liu's ability to negotiate these disparate states of being - drawing the dead from life and, perhaps, drawing life from the dead.

Liu was born in Changchun, China in 1948 and graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. She immigrated to the US in 1984 to attend the University of California, San Diego where she received an MFA. Liu currently lives in Oakland and is a tenured professor in the art department at Mills College. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and the National Endowment of the Arts Painting Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited extensively internationally and is represented in major museum collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.