Not a mirage: the rapidly growing Phoenix metropolitan area, which includes the towns of Scottsdale and Tempe, has become a substantial venue for contemporary art - Report From Arizona

Art in America, Dec, 2002 by Raphael Rubinstein

More conventional, but similarly involved in cultural memory and social identity, are the paintings of Hung Liu. The ASU show of 31 of Liu's paintings made since 1997 was titled "Strange Fruit," a phrase more often associated with African-American history than with the Asian experience that is the chief subject of the Chinese-born Lin. After living through "reeducation" during the Cultural Revolution and being trained as a social-realist painter, Liu immigrated to the U.S. in 1984. The large 80-by-160-inch painting that gave the show its title, Strange Fruit (Comfort Women), 2001, is typical of Liu's work in both its impressive scale and historical subject matter--in this case, the Korean women who were pressed into sexual bondage by the Japanese army during World War II. Liu depicts a group of them, looking, by turns, sad, embittered, resigned and bewildered. Images of chrysalises and butterflies suggest regeneration for the survivors. Behind the tragic figures is a deep red, drip-ridden background riven by images of Japanese swords.

Like every other painting in this impressive show (which was also organized by Lineberry, who is senior curator at the ASU Museum), Strange Fruit (Comfort Women) fields a powerful blend of photo-based imagery and painterly effects that Liu does better than practically any other current painter, here or abroad. ("Hung Liu: Strange Fruit" can be seen at the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, Calif., Oct. 27, 2002-Feb. 23, 2003.)

Running concurrently at ASU with the Hung Liu and Alison Saar shows, was a thematic exhibition of video works titled "Not Quite Myself Today." In it, ASU curator John D. Spiak explored the social construction of personality through a cohesive group of slyly humorous works by artists such as Alex Bag, Jennifer Zackin, Sanford Biggers and S.E. Barnet. Every spring, the museum mounts a festival of short film and videos.

In March of this year, ASU added an important and innovative component to its facilities, the Ceramics Research Center. Housed in a converted one-story commercial building next to the museum, the 7,200-square-foot center includes a gallery, archive and storage space for a collection of more than 3,000 pieces. Billing itself as the country's largest collection of 20th-century British and American ceramics, the center draws on a collection that ASU began in 1968; through purchases and donations, it has grown greatly in the last few years. Represented in the collection is nearly every prominent figure in postwar ceramics, from Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada to Lucie Rie, Peter Voulkos, Ken Price, Betty Woodman and Michael Lucero. Works are displayed singly on pedestals, as well as in an "open stack" area where glass-fronted tiers of shelves allow visitors to examine the collection as a whole in depth. Hunting among the hundreds of pieces on display, one comes across wonderful anonymous American canning jars, elegant black vessels by the great Native American potter Maria Martinez, iridescent flasks by Beatrice Wood, zany examples of California funk and countless other treasures. The center has ambitions to become the preeminent site for documenting the history of modern ceramics. To this end, it is acquiring the archive of prominent ceramics scholar Susan Harnly Peterson and beginning to build an on-line database. Currently, the center has a show of new pieces by Faraday Newsome Sredl (Aug. 25-Dec. 14). Early next year, it will put on display some 200 works promised to it by local art lovers Sara and David Lieberman, who have a world-class ceramics collection (Jan. 26-May 18).