Fine art painter and former scenic designer Liming Tang is a modest person.
“I’d love to show all my works some day,” she says. “And have my own show. Right now I don’t even have my own web page. No time to put it up – also I don’t feel I’m good enough yet.”
The artist’s protests aside, Tang’s work is “good enough” and then some. In 1989 Chinese-born Tang’s paintings were included in the first-ever group exhibition of women artists to be held in Beijing. “Seven Women Artists” was displayed at the National Fine Arts Museum, the largest and most prestigious art institution in China. The museum later acquired Tang’s landscape painting, “Birch,” for its permanent collection.
A novelty in its day, the exhibition was covered by the official press and TV, with the result that a lot of people came to view it, Tang says.
“The reason is, right after the Cultural Revolution, people all wanted to see something new,” she says.
Just last year Tang exhibited again in China along with some of the members of the 1989 group. “The Journey from Past to Present: Seven Women Artists” included the paintings of five of the original seven, with two new women, a painter and a sculptor, added to complete the magic number. That exhibition was held in Beijing’s Today Art Museum (TAM), which is dedicated to the development of contemporary art in China.
Tang, who teaches painting and drawing as well as Chinese language classes at Indian River Charter High School, arrived in Vero Beach in 2011. The personal journey that led her here began in The People’s Republic of China, where she was born in 1955. Since that time both the country and the artist have seen many changes.
The essay printed in the handsome catalog for the 2013 “Seven Women Artists” exhibition hints at those changes:
“As the generation of the late 1950s and ‘60s who underwent the difficult political and economic eras of the Republic, these seven women were fortunate enough to be able to get into art academies in the late ‘70s and to then mature in the 1980s, a special period of transition.”
This, of course, is a delicate reference to the disastrous policies of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) and the Cultural Revolution. The former campaign of industrial and agricultural collectivization is blamed for the Great Chinese Famine, while the latter, by suppressing both Western and traditional culture in Chinese society, sought to strengthen and unify the Communist Party under Mao Zedong. Instituted in 1966, the Cultural Revolution did not effectively end until reforms came after Mao’s death a decade later.
At least two of the paintings that appeared in the 2013 exhibition were from what Tang calls her “Red Wall Project.”
The larger of these, a canvas measuring over five feet high by seven-and-a-half feet wide, shows a sunny plaza filled with bicycles and pedicabs. The pavement stops short at a massive red wall that completely fills the picture’s background. Before the wall a group of old men huddles around a chessboard where a game is in progress.
Executed in a highly realistic style, the ostensible subject of the painting is an everyday scene that occurs thousands of times across China: senior citizens enjoying their leisure time.
The significance of the painting, however, is in its details.
Standing at the rear of the group, one of the kibitzers wears the drab green uniform jacket and cap of the once-feared Red Guard. During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guard was responsible for destroying many historical, cultural and religious sites — including museums, libraries, temples and even tombs — and the artifacts they held, all in the name of “purifying” society.
The painting’s imposing red wall is anything but a mute presence. “It has a slogan here,” Tang says, pointing to a faded inscription that runs the length of the wall.
“We are going to continue the counter-revolution,” she translates.
The slogan had great meaning to the generation represented in the painting, Tang says.
“This generation of people was the Red Guard. They are getting old and they have nothing to do, so they play chess,” says Tang.
And if that is not enough to suggest that a new era reigns in China, a can of soda bearing the white-on-red logo of Coca-Cola rests at the feet of one of the men, a subtle reminder of the ubiquity of Western-style commerce.
A measure of the change that has come to China was the lack of concern on the part of the exhibiting institution about the painting’s message.
“I sent them a (photo) of it first,” Tang says. “I felt, ‘Okay, it’s going to be a huge problem.’”
The museum, however, sent a welcome response.
“They said, ‘You should not have (faded the slogan) so much. It’s okay.’ ”
Because she was, in the words of the catalog essay, one of those “fortunate enough to be able to get into art academies,” Tang received a bachelor’s degree in Theater Design Arts in 1982 from the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing. Afterwards she segued into the position of resident scenic designer at Beijing’s China Opera & Dance Drama Theater.
In 1990, China was suffering the after-effects of the previous year’s Tiananmen Square protests when Tang left to study theater design in the United States. Tang’s husband and baby daughter joined her in the U.S. in 1991.
According to Tang, there was a simple reason for her desire to study here. At the Academy of Drama in China she had studied Western-style art and theater. Now, she said, “I wanted to come here to see it for myself.”
Tang entered Northern Illinois University’s Theater Arts program, receiving her MFA with an emphasis in scenic design in 1995.
After that she found her first teaching position in theater arts in Decatur, Illinois at Millikin University; Tang later taught at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas and at the State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz. At the same time she maintained a hefty schedule of designing for the stage.
Tang estimates that she created upwards of 100 stage designs for theaters that included the Center for Visual and Performing Arts in Munster, Indiana; the Theatre Building Chicago in that city’s Lake View neighborhood; the New Paltz Summer Repertory Theatre; and SUNY’s McKenna Theatre. Critics called her work imaginative, evocative and magical.
After a while, however, Tang decided she’d done enough theater. “I really want to do art.” So she went back to school at the New York Academy of Art, in New York City, where she received an MFA in Studio Painting in 2010.
Although Tang’s schedule at Vero Beach Charter High School is full, she continues to paint on weekends and during summer breaks.
In her Vero Beach home stands her latest work in progress, a beach scene.
“When you think about Vero Beach you have to think about the beach, the people,” she says.
The five-by-six foot painting features 29 figures, mostly young adults, sunbathing, surfing and ogling one another. At the right side of the composition, a boy with a boogie board gives a cute Asian girl in a red string bikini the once-over.
Tang based that figure on her daughter.
She asserts that incorporating a large cast of characters in the scene was a way to challenge herself.
“I wanted to do something a little bit different,” she says. “I want to make myself a little bit better.”