Leona Heights Neighborhood

by Larry Laverty

The birds are what caught my eye first, white cranes in flight, as I made my way to the gate at Oakland Airport. I was always in a hurry, coming or going, and walked by the mural a number of times before I stopped one day. The artist is Hung Liu. She lives in our neighborhood. How cool is that! I’d met Hung at a couple of neighborhood gatherings but didn’t know anything about her, her career, her life. That changed one day last month when I had a wonderful visit with Hung and her husband Jeff Kelley. Hung’s life is a story of passion, determination, and personal freedom, the kind of stuff that movies are made of.

Hung Liu painting in her East Oakland studio. Photo by Jeff Kelley. 

Hung was born in Manchuria, in northeastern China at the time of the Communist Revolution. Hung’s father, an officer in Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army, had been arrested and sent to prison. To protect herself and newborn Hung, Hung’s mother had to divorce her husband. One of Hung’s earliest memories is of a drawing she did when she was five years old. Her mother saw that Hung was gifted in art and praised her.

From that point forward, Hung continued to draw and make other works of art, and her passion grew, along with the recognition of her talents by others. A gifted student of many subjects, Hung was admitted to a prestigious Beijing middle and high school. But again, upheaval in the country shaped her life. This time, it was the great Cultural Revolution.

Established people who lived in the cities were to be reeducated and enlightened under the new ruling class: the workers, the poor, the proletariat. Hung was sent to the countryside to work in the fields. She had no family there, there were no holidays, and Hung earned the respect of the local villagers by carrying heavy sacks of grain. This period of Hung’s life enriched her, made her stronger, and deepened the vision by which she viewed life that soon came out in her art.

After her four years of labor in the countryside were over, Hung was admitted to Beijing Teachers College, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts. Admitted to the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, she earned a masters degree in Mural Painting. But all this training was controlled and prescribed.

The ruling class saw artists, muralists in particular, as useful in maintaining power by educating the public. But Hung rebelled. She frequently went off by herself and secretly painted landscapes the way she wanted to, the way she felt, and she kept the paintings hidden.

It became clear what she’d have to do next: go to the United States, where she’d have freedom. For four years she fought for permission to leave the country. Finally, she was allowed to leave, came to California to study and earned an MFA at UC San Diego. There she met her future husband, Jeff Kelley.

Together, Hung and Jeff first went to Texas for work, and in 1990 came to Oakland, where Hung has continued her remarkable artistic journey. At Mills College, Hung has passed on her knowledge by teaching art for over 20 years. She’s a full professor at Mills and the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including two fellowships in painting from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of major art museums around the country, including The National Museum of American Art in Washington D.C., art museums in New York, Los Angeles, San Jose, Sacramento, Oakland, and in San Francisco at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and The de Young Museum.

This will be the twentieth year that Hung has lived in Leona Heights. Now, when you notice the mural on glass of the white cranes at Oakland Airport, it will hold extra meaning for you.

Hung continues to paint, adding to a body of work that will be included a year from now, in February 2013, at the Oakland Museum’s retrospective exhibition of Hung Liu’s art, art that is an expression of a unique and thoughtful life.