Artists

Hung Liu was a pioneering Chinese-born American painter whose work explored memory, history, and identity through reimagined historical photographs. Trained in Socialist Realism in Beijing and later exposed to conceptual art in California, Liu forged a distinctive visual language that combined meticulous draftsmanship with washes and drips of linseed oil—a technique she described as “weeping realism.” This strategy blurred photographic authority into painterly ambiguity, evoking the fragility of memory and the erosion of historical truth.

Her subjects often included women, children, refugees, laborers, and soldiers drawn from 19th- and 20th-century Chinese photographs, particularly images of prostitutes and marginalized figures. By transforming anonymous sitters into monumental, dignified presences, Liu sought to “wash them of their otherness” and elevate them to the realm of history painting. Later series extended this approach to American subjects, including Dust Bowl migrants after Dorothea Lange, linking her own experience of displacement in Maoist China with broader human struggles.

Born in Changchun, Liu endured the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, including four years of forced labor in the countryside, before studying at Beijing Teachers College and the Central Academy of Fine Arts. In 1984 she immigrated to the United States to pursue graduate study at the University of California, San Diego, where exposure to conceptualism and artists such as Allan Kaprow, Lorna Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems expanded her practice into multimedia and installation.

Over her career, Liu presented major retrospectives including Summoning Ghosts: The Art of Hung Liu (Oakland Museum of California, 2013) and Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands (Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, 2021), the latter the first solo exhibition by an Asian American woman at the museum. Her work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, among others.

A two-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Liu was Professor Emerita at Mills College, Oakland, where she taught from 1990 until her death. Her paintings continue to resonate as powerful meditations on exile, resilience, and the blurred boundaries between personal and collective history.