In her early career, Liu found a catalogue of a traveling American exhibition entitled Faces of China as Seen by Photographers and Travelers 1860-1912. A recycled image by Liu aptly named Olympia, is a copied image from this catalogue. We see a Chinese prostitute who is placed in an ornately decorated room. She lies on her side as she faces the camera, eyes staring blankly at the photographer. In this photograph, the Western artist had many intentions, which included the need to depict China as Oriental, exotic, and scandalous. This is easily obtained by photographing a woman who is staring directly at the viewer. It illustrates her accessibility and lack of agency. The stare is blank, showing no psychological presence. She is then likened to the decorative inanimate objects surrounding her, making her a possession. Her position is inviting as well, and furthers the notion of the ‘Orient’ as being exotic. As a result, it provides European society with comfort that places like the Orient have less moral values, therefore easily enabling China and other foreign countries to be objectified. In depicting this type of scene, Westerners are able to create an identity about the East while at the same time judging the society and believing that they are superior over China. How does Liu change the image? She is merely imitating the photograph, seemingly perpetuating the patriarchal gaze upon these nameless and voiceless women.

In order to properly examine these images created by Liu, a great number of factors must be addressed. First, the viewer is important. Has the viewer changed from when this photograph was taken to Liu’s reclamation of the image? The source photograph could have been taken by two people: a wealthy, white man who has journeyed to China to see how ‘strange’ or ‘different’ it is from the rest of the world and who wanted to take back a photograph of his exotic adventures, or a Chinese man who is paid by said wealthy, white man who can communicate with the courtesan and tell her what to do. Today, documentation of that viewer is lost, and the image still remains. Liu’s copy of the work in painting format creates a new viewer: the woman.

A man put them there on a couch, a chair, with the intention to sell them as products. The women had no control. But now that man is gone yet the imagery of these women is left. It has survived through time and space, even a revolution. When I felt the women looking at me, somehow I just wanted to empower them.”1

Liu saw a voiceless woman in these photographs. She looked past the surface rendering and curiously began thinking about who was behind the camera. Removing the European, masculine gaze, Liu is able to also expunge the judgment placed upon these women, or the idea of the exotic or the sexually erotic.

Perhaps by confiscating the image and re-appropriating it, she reclaims the identities of the voiceless women in these works. Liu believes that she can regain some information for them that were lost:

I communicate with the characters in my paintings, prostitutes-these completely subjugated people-with reverence, sympathy and awe. They had no real names. Probably no children. I want to make up stories for them. Who were they? Did they leave any trace in history?2

The stories that Liu creates for these women probably include the fact that they were sold into prostitution or that they had no choice of whether or not they took this photograph or not. They probably did not know what a photograph was, since the Western invasion of China brought many new and strange inventions, such as the steamboat, the automobile, and the camera. Instead of taking the image for its face value, Liu questions the factors that came to create this photograph. Who was taking the picture? What kind of person is he or she? What values do they hold? What is his or her gender? What status does he or she have over the subject? Was this photograph meant to be a portrait of a specific person with a name or an object of the photographer’s gaze? How does the subject feel at this moment? Did she consent to having her picture taken? Did she have any say in how she wanted to be portrayed? In contextually examining the work of Hung Liu, it is seen that the viewer is a man who asserted his dominance over this Chinese courtesan and metaphorically asserted Western superiority over the Chinese race through taking this photograph. Hung Liu, a native of China, sees these women as sisters and sharers of the pain of being a second-class citizen for being a woman in China.

Another indication of Liu’s attempts to revise this image is the title. Olympia refers to a painting by Manet with the same title. This image depicts a white woman confidently lying naked in her bed, while a black servant enters bearing flowers. At first one would think that in referencing a famous painter such as Manet, Liu would be praising his work. However, it seems as though she is exposing the masculine gaze placed on women in images of this time. Manet depicts his subject as an object, for she is naked and accessible to the viewer. Although the subject in Liu’s Olympia is fully clothed, she depicts the same accessibility, in her posture and in her direct stare at the viewer. This reference to a famous painter shows that Westerners have subjected women to this type of gaze within the European race but also within other countries and societies of women. It also shows that even though the courtesan from China is shown to be more exotic through the Western definition of Orientalism.

Liu’s treatment of the painting is also an indication that she is working to reverse the gaze that male Westerners placed upon women in China. Her abstract expressionist drips and splatters breaks from the realism of the painting and shows that this image should not be considered as a true depiction of the incident. Perhaps the woman was forced into taking this photograph. She may be chained to the bed and threatened to be in the photograph. She may not know what has happened, and is in shock at the very moment that the photographer completed the picture. Considering the role of the courtesan as well, perhaps one may question why the man is there. Is he partaking in her services? The woman has been illustrated as vulnerable, tempting, exotic, scandalous, sinful, and inferior.

Liu’s intentions surface as one realizes that she merely does not copy the found image. At first copying the image, she pays homage to those women who were nameless throughout history and whose images were lost in the destruction during the Cultural Revolution. Then she revises the image, displaying that it cannot be taken for face value, but instead the viewer and the photographer must be taken into account. Photography was a new technology that was brought by Westerners at the time, and so she reveals the Western influence on Chinese society during the nineteenth century. Her work is the discrepancy in history between Chinese culture and in Western culture. She chooses to present the viewer with images that call attention to the way things are and works to revise it. She depicts prostitutes who are stripped of their name and forced to pose among Western inventions, hard-working people, and the turmoil and pain that women faced in a patriarchal China. It is important to understand her reasons for copying old photographs, and those reasons can be traced back to the history of her life.

Hung Liu was born in 1948 in northeast China in the city of Chang Chung. Her father was a Nationalist military officer of Chiang Kai-Shek. Captured and jailed by Communists when Liu was six months old, her mother was forced to divorce her husband who had fought on the wrong side. Liu had not met her father until 1994. At the age of eighteen in 1966, the Cultural Revolution occurred. Liu and other ‘intellectuals’ were sent to a military farm in the countryside for reeducation. Allowed to return to college, she still did not have any creative freedom. According to Mao Zedong, art was not about individual expression or inspiration, but a means to serve the masses and glorify the state. Liu remembers that when she was in China, “artists were expected to be tools of propaganda. Abstract individualistic paintings are not acceptable in schools or for public exhibition.”3 Although the Cultural Revolution was supposed to be a means of equalizing everyone in China, it was forced and therefore created a larger disparity between the masses and Mao Zedong.

During the Cultural Revolution, these vastly available images of prostitutes were deemed part of the Old Traditions of China and were destroyed, along with family photos, temples, and other traditional Chinese artifacts. By reviving these images of the old China, a China that welcomed foreigners and their modern technology, Liu is rebelling against all teachings from her Chinese schooling. She was taught to be a voice for the state and for the success of the Cultural Revolution. In recognizing what the Red Guards destroyed during this time and attempting to resurrect those images, she is considered a traitor. She was also taught that it was a highest skill to draw from real life, and so copying from a photograph would be frowned upon in her art schooling.4

Through images of prostitutes, Liu is able to subtly relay the knowledge that the West was very involved in the East during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as can be seen in the photographs from which she copies. In Olympia, the woman reclines on a chair, something that was imported in China by Western trade. The Qing Dynasty, which spanned the late seventeenth century to the nineteenth century, was reluctant in allowing foreigners and their foreign goods to enter China. However, The East India Company, which dominated trade between Europe and China between 1719 and 1833, exchanged Chinese goods for window glass, clocks, coral, chairs, and metals.5 Something that was initially a successful commodity was Prussian blue, the ‘foreign blue.’ Hung Liu uses this color scantily in her artwork, which perhaps alludes to the foreign influence in Chinese life. In Olympia, the only blue seen is in the embellishment on the courtesan’s shoes, the decorative aspects of the footstool, and the abstract expressionist circles that deface the image. Night Lily from 2007 is another reclining courtesan, who seems to look exactly like the woman in Olympia, although Liu adds a man in the background who is wearing a bright Prussian blue shirt. In her inclusion of Western imports in her work regarding Chinese prostitutes, Liu subtly asserts the fact that Westerners took these photographs of these women. With their inclusion in these images, it also shows that they are constructing these images of China, and therefore not permitting a self-representation in this type of imagery.