Hung Liu
Watch
Artist Interview 'Hung Liu: The Sun Also Rises,' 2020
Artist News
Exhibition
Georgetown University Art Gallery
Hung Liu: Happy & Gay
January 17 – April 13, 2025
Hung Liu: Happy and Gay, curated by Georgetown University Art and Curatorial Studies graduate students in collaboration with Dr. Dorothy Moss, presents a selection of Liu’s works from 2011-2013. In the series, Liu revisits cartoons of her youth that were published in children’s books and primers (known as xiaorenshu). Like the Dick and Jane readers circulating in the United States during the postwar era, the illustrations were used in China to socialize children by instilling values such as hard work, family unity, and patriotism. Liu’s reformulation of this palm-size historic childhood imagery into large-scale, richly-painted contemporary canvases not only turns mass-produced illustrations into paintings but also raises questions at the intersection of ideology, propaganda, and education. Liu invites viewers to think critically about the words and images that shape our collective identities, challenging us to reimagine them, a form of rewriting history. As she often said, “history is a verb. It is constantly flowing forward.”
Publication
National Portrait Gallery Exhibition Catalog
Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands presents the stunning work of this contemporary Chinese American artist. Liu (b. 1948) blends painting and photography to offer new frameworks for understanding portraiture in relation to time, memory, and history. Often working from photographs, she uses portraiture to elevate overlooked subjects, amplifying the stories of those who have historically been invisible or unheard. This richly illustrated book examines six decades of Liu’s painting, photography, and drawing. Author Dorothy Moss illuminates the importance of family photographs in Liu’s work; Nancy Lim examines the origins of Liu’s artistic practice; Lucy R. Lippard explores issues of identity and multiculturalism; and Elizabeth Partridge focuses on Liu’s recent series based on Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era photographs. Philip Tinari, along with artists Amy Sherald and Carrie Mae Weems, among others, conveys Liu’s impact on contemporary art. Having lived through war, political revolution, exile, and displacement, Liu paints a complex picture of an Asian Pacific American experience. Her portraits speak powerfully to those seeking a better life, in the United States and elsewhere.
Recent Acquisitions
These public institutions have recently acquired works by Hung Liu: Art Bridges Foundation, Bentonville, AR; The Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA; The Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, New Hampshire; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA.
Selected Work
Exhibition Catalog
Gallery Exhibitions
Hung Liu: The Sun Also Rises
September 17 – November 25, 2020
Hung Liu: Promised Land
April 29 – June 24, 2017
Hung Liu: Happy and Gay
November 15, 2012 – January 12, 2013
Hung Liu: Drawing from Life and Death
April 15 – May 22, 2010
Hung Liu: Daughters of China, 1938
October 18 – November 24, 2007
Hung Liu: Polly Bemis
October 13 – November 26, 2005
Hung Liu: Towards Peng-Lai
May 1 – June 7, 2003
Hung Liu: 2000
September 7 – October 14, 2000
Watch
In Conversation: Lava Thomas + Hung Liu, October 9, 2020
Artist Interview, Hung Liu: The Sun Also Rises, 2020
Hung Liu was born in Changchun, China in 1948, growing up under the Maoist regime. Initially trained in the Socialist Realist style, Liu studied mural painting as a graduate student at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, before immigrating to the US in 1984 to attend the University of California, San Diego, where she studied under Allan Kaprow, the American originator of Happenings.
Known for paintings based on historical Chinese photographs, Hung Liu’s subjects over the years have been prostitutes, refugees, street performers, soldiers, laborers, and prisoners, among others. As a painter, Liu challenges the documentary authority of historical Chinese photographs by subjecting them to the more reflective process of painting. Much of the meaning of Liu’s painting comes from the way the washes and drips dissolve the documentary images, suggesting the passage of memory into history, while working to uncover the cultural and personal narratives fixed – but often concealed – in the photographic instant. Washing her subjects in veils of dripping linseed oil, she both “preserves and destroys the image.” Liu has invented a kind of weeping realism that surrenders to the erosion of memory and the passage of time, while also bringing faded photographic images vividly to life as rich, facile paintings. She summons the ghosts of history to the present. In effect, Liu turns old photographs into new paintings.
Recently, Liu shifted her focus from Chinese to American subjects. By training her attention on the displaced individuals and wandering families of the American Dustbowl, Liu found a landscape of overarching struggle and underlying humanity that for her was familiar terrain, having been raised in China during an era (Mao’s) of epic revolution, tumult, and displacement. The 1930s Oakies and Bindlestiff’s wandering like ghosts through Liu’s newest paintings are American peasants on their way to California, the promised land. In these paintings, which have departed from her known fluid style in which drips and washes of linseed oil dissolve the photo-based images the way time erodes memory, she developed a kind of topographic realism in which the paint congeals around a webbing of colored lines, together enmeshed in a rich surface that belies the poverty of her subjects. In this, the new paintings are more factually woven to Lange’s photographs while also releasing the energy of color like a radiant of hope from beneath the grey-tones of history.
A two time recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in painting, Liu also received a Lifetime Achievement Award in Printmaking from the Southern Graphics Council International in 2011. In 2013, a traveling retrospective of Liu’s work, “Summoning Ghosts: The Art and Life of Hung Liu,” was organized by the Oakland Museum of California. In 2021, the National Portrait Gallery is hosting a retrospective of Liu’s work. The Wall Street Journal has called Liu “the greatest Chinese painter in the US.” Her works have been exhibited extensively and collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and the Los Angeles County Museum, among others. She taught at Mills College from 1990-2014, after which she continued on as Professor Emerita. Liu lived in Oakland, California until her death in August, 2021.
