Hung Liu

(American, born 1948, died 2021)

Chinese-American artist Hung Liu (1948-2021) created figurative paintings using imagery from 20th-century historical photographs to explore themes of identity, memory, and personal and national history. She often referenced issues and themes that relate to Chinese and Chinese-American working-class experiences. Liu once said her goal in America was “to invent a way of allowing myself to practice as a Chinese artist outside of a Chinese culture.”

Liu was born in Changchun, China and studied painting at the Central Academy for Fine Art in Beijing, China. She immigrated to the United States in 1984 and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego in 1986. She was Professor Emerita at Mills College in Oakland, California, and taught art there from 1990-2014. Her art is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (SFMOMA), Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and more. In 1998-99, a retrospective of Liu's work "Summoning Ghosts: The Art of Hung Liu" traveled the U.S.