Music of the Great Earth: Hung Liu at Pie Projects

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, will showcase rare large masterworks by Hung Liu, and will coincide with Hung Liu: Sanctuary showing at Turner Carroll from August 20th to September 19th.

Hung Liu: Sanctuary and Music of the Great Earth: Hung Liu at Pie Projects open just a month after Hung’s solo exhibition Golden Gate opens 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.”

Included in the exhibition is 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.

Opening reception at Pie Projects is Saturday, August 21, from 2-4 pm. Stay with us for a special event sponsored by Tamarind Institute, featuring National Portrait Gallery curator Dorothy Moss, mega-collector Jordan Schnitzer, and Gallerist Tonya Turner Carroll from 4-5:30 pm immediately after the opening. Please RSVP at connect@pieprojects.org.

Hung Liu, Storyteller, 2000, 77 x 77″, oil on canvas

Hung Liu, Dandelion with Fish, 2019, 32 x 31″ unframed, monotype with gold leaf