If you’ve traveled out of Oakland airport, you’ve probably seen a beautiful piece of artwork – graceful, long-legged cranes painted on the windows in Terminal 2. It’s called “Going Away, Coming Home.” It’s a piece about being of and from two places at once, about the in-between existence we inhabit in transit. By looking at it, you’d probably never imagine that the artist once risked her life to make paintings like this.
It’s by Hung Liu, one of the most influential Chinese artists of her generation. Liu moved to the US in 1984, and is retiring as a professor at Mills College this year, where’s she’s taught for the last 20 years.
This week, Hung Liu’s lifetime retrospective, “Summoning Ghosts,” opens as the Oakland Museum of California. KALW’s Julie Caine takes us behind the scenes of the exhibition, which measures the artist’s body of work with more than 80 paintings, drawings and photographs.
Click the audio player above to listen to the story.
