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Women

A wall of art depicting Chinese women
A label reading, Hung Liu (1948–2021) was born in Changchun to a family of educators during the Chinese Civil War. After Chairman Mao Zedong’s Communist forces took over China in 1949, her father was imprisoned for anti-Communist politics. When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, Liu’s mother felt forced to destroy family records—including most photographs—to erase their past privilege. Like millions of her generation, Liu was sent to the countryside under Mao’s “youth reeducation” program. From 1968 to 1972, she labored in a village near Beijing. There she began sketching and secretly learned to use a friend’s camera (a rarity during this time) to take her first pictures. Her interest in the medium of photography later helped inform her paintings. After schools reopened in 1972, Liu studied at Beijing Teachers College and Central Academy of Fine Arts. In 1984, she immigrated for graduate school at the University of California, San Diego. Liu found inspiration there that fueled her creativity and experimentation. Critical success followed, along with U.S. citizenship in 1991. For much of Liu’s painting career, she based her expressive portraits on 19th century photographs she found of marginalized and exploited people of China. Reflecting on her own immigration experience and studying the recent history of her adopted country, she was inspired to paint resilient pioneers of the American West. The examples on view here show how she revitalized portraits of early Chinese immigrants.
A label with a photo of a smiling woman reading, After immigrating to the United States, Liu reflected on the process of becoming an American. She had great empathy for the histories of other early immigrants, especially those from China. Her Chinese in Idaho series reinterprets photographs of pioneer Polly Bemis (1853–1933). Here, Liu uplifts an already sunny depiction of Polly with layered color and vibrancy. Liu’s drips and washes veil her subjects, suggesting the blurring of memories over time. Yet she simultaneously celebrates and preserves their images. Polly, whose Chinese name was possibly Lalu Nathoy, was sold into slavery by her father during a famine and brought to the United States as a teen. She was purchased by a Chinese saloon owner and taken to Idaho Territory in 1872. After several years, she gained her freedom and became financially independent running a boarding house and managing laundry for miners. She married an American in 1894, and they settled on a ranch by the Salmon River.
A label with a photo of a woman with a horse reading, Polly’s husband was often ill in his later years, and she managed the brunt of ranch work. Here, she stands with her horses Nellie and Julie. It is unlikely that, as a child with bound feet (later unbound) and sold into slavery, she could have imagined her future pioneer life in Idaho. She had experienced great trauma but remained optimistic and resilient, eventually learning to thrive on the Idaho frontier. Hung Liu presents Polly in color, collaged with drawings and thin, dripping washes veiling the picture. The circles that are often found in Liu’s art represent eternity; with no beginning or end, they link past with present. Much of the meaning of my painting comes from the way the washes and drips dissolve the photo-based images, opening them to a slower kind of looking, suggesting perhaps the cultural and personal narratives fixed in the photographic instant … I hope to wash my subjects of their exotic “otherness” and reveal them as dignified, even mythic figures on the grander scale of history painting. —Hung Liu
A label with a photograph of a man and woman reading, Chinese immigrants were often called “China Mary” and “China John” as opposed to others learning their real names. In the case of this portrait, records show the woman’s partial name as Ah Yuen (“Ms. Yuan,” c. 1848–1939). She arrived in California in the 1860s, and later owned a retail shop in the mining town of Park City, Utah. She settled in Evanston, Wyoming, where she was a landowner and gardener. Ah Yuen was a fixture in the town for 40 years and, as one of few Chinese women, was a sought-after subject for photographs. She capitalized on requests by charging 10 cents each. This larger-than-life portrait of Ah Yuen represents many Chinese immigrant women whose names and faces have been lost to history. The artist surrounds her with red Indian Paintbrush and a Western Meadowlark, both representing the state of Wyoming, where she prospered.
Two pairs of Chinese colorful fabric shoes.
A pair of small black embroidered shoes.
A label reading, For 1,000 years, the complex tradition of foot-binding represented the height of female refinement in China. Administered by women to the young girls in their family, the small, reshaped feet often translated into a way of achieving upward mobility in marriage. “Lotus” shoes were handmade by the wearer and often embroidered, as seen in the examples here. The foot-binding tradition, which evolved by region and over centuries, was outlawed in China in 1912 and gradually ended within a few decades. The few Chinese women who came to the United States in the 1800s were typically wives of merchants, mui tsai (indentured servants), or trafficked workers for the society’s many brothels. Regardless of social status, they were treated as the property of men. When women with bound feet arrived in the United States, they were seen as disfigured. Wanting to adapt — and having an opportunity to try — some women “let out” their feet, though it was as painful as the initial binding process. Polly Bemis, whose portraits are nearby, is one immigrant who unbound her feet. “Wives of merchants, who were at the top of the social hierarchy in Chinatown, usually had bound feet and led bound lives. But even women of the laboring class — without bound feet — found themselves confined to the domestic sphere. … Their unique status was due to the circumstances of their immigration and the dynamic ways in which race, class, gender, and culture intersected in their lives.” —Judy Yung, Unbound Feet, A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (1995)
Flower details on an embroidered skirt
Flower details on an embroidered skirt
A label reading, This skirt, called a mamianqun, represents a popular wrap-style worn by Chinese women for hundreds of years. Early immigrants to America wore this type of skirt into the early 1900s. The panels and borders often were embroidered, as in this example, with auspicious symbols like peonies and the stylized bat near the bottom left of the main panel. Embroidery (xiuhua or zhahua, “making decorations with a needle”) has been a part of Chinese visual culture for thousands of years. Renowned for its refinement and tightly woven designs, colorful threaded patterns made by women adorn clothing, housewares, and art objects. “Embroidery was more than a skill that daughters learned from mothers; it was a conduit for a female culture that one generation of gentry women passed on to the next along with their emotions and dreams.” —Dorothy Ko, Every Step a Lotus, Shoes for Bound Feet (2001)
A pair of blue embroidered slippers
A label reading, This pair of embroidered slippers — not for bound feet — symbolizes the beginnings of empowerment and independence for Chinese American women in the early 20th century. Women’s movements in both China and the United States advocated for social and educational reforms. Chinese American women also joined the YWCA and formed civic groups like the Square and Circle Club. The latter hosted an American-style dance in 1924, featuring “American jazz by a Chinese orchestra and American dancing by Chinese girls in American party frocks and heels.” It was the beginning of a new era, indeed.

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