Read Latest News: Hung Liu's legacy of mentorship lives on at Mills College Art Museum Hung Liu (b. 1948 - d. 2021) 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 challenged 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 invented what can be termed '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.Starting around 2015, 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. In these paintings, a departure from her known fluid style, 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, these 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 received a Lifetime Achievement Award in Printmaking from the Southern Graphics Council International in 2011. In 2021, the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian organized “Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands,” a retrospective look at the artist’s portraits. Curated by Dorothy Moss, this daring embrace of human countenance across multiple cultures, histories, and identities was the first solo show by an Asian American woman in the National Portrait Gallery's history. Unfortunately, Liu died of pancreatic cancer just three weeks before the show opened in Washington.Liu’s works have been exhibited extensively and collected by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art and The National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and the Los Angeles County Museum, among others. At her death, Liu was Professor Emerita at Mills College, in Oakland, California, where she taught since 1990.Her legacy is represented by Hung Liu Estate, in Oakland, California. Click here to view the artist's CV.