Asia Talks: Hung Liu Online

Join us for events with artists who have immigrated to the US from Asia and the Middle East, on their art, heritage, and coping with the present moment. Each artist will appear in conversation with Laila Kazmi, Kazbar Media. Hung Liu will discuss her art training and mural paintings in Mao’s China before immigrating to the US in 1984, her shift to painting from historical photographs, and her current work assembling paintings on shaped panels.

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About the Presenters

Hung Liu was born in Changchun, China in 1948, growing up during the Maoist regime. Initially trained in the Socialist Realist style, Liu studied as a graduate student at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. She also painted while visiting the Buddhist caves at Dunhuang, before immigrating to attend art school at the University of California, San Diego.

Known for paintings based on historical Chinese photographs, Liu’s subjects over the years have been refugees, prostitutes, street performers, soldiers, laborers, and prisoners, among others. 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.

Recently, Liu has shifted her focus from Chinese to American subjects. Painting the displaced individuals and wandering families of the American Dustbowl as photographed by Dorothea Lange, Liu finds a landscape of migration, struggle, and humanity. For her, it is familiar terrain, having lived through tumult and displacement in China.

A retrospective of Liu’s work, Summoning Ghosts: The Art and Life of Hung Liu, was organized by the Oakland Museum of California, and toured nationally through 2015. Liu currently lives in Oakland, California. In 2021, a retrospective of her portrait-based paintings will be at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC.