People whom history has silenced are made heroic and beautiful in the paintings of Chinese American artist Hung Liu. Dubbed the “greatest Chinese painter in the US” by The Wall Street Journal, the subject matter of Liu’s paintings comes from historical photographs. Through a style she calls “weeping realism,” her artwork breathes new life into the stories of those who have been marginalized by society. “I hope to wash my subjects of their ‘otherness,’” she once said, “and reveal them as dignified, even mythic figures on the grander scale of history painting.”
Liu was born in 1948 in Northeastern China as political upheaval gripped the nation. In her early 20s, during China’s Cultural Revolution, she was forced to undergo four years of “reeducation” by doing farm labor in a rural village. She took refuge in secretly drawing and taking photographs of her fellow villagers. It was during this time that she created the collection Countryside Drawings, a series of pencil sketches of Chinese villagers that displays each subject as startlingly beautiful and human. Some even include handwritten descriptions of the subjects in the margins; one drawing of an eighty-six-year-old man notes that he used to sell flower bouquets. Countryside Drawings was not published until forty years later, when Liu was living in the United States after years of studying and teaching art in China.
Despite bureaucratic hurdles, Liu moved to the United States in 1984 to study art at the University of California at San Diego. In 1985, she had her first one-person exhibition at the Sheppard Gallery at the University of Nevada, and in 1989, a collection of her paintings debuted in New York City. She began teaching at Mills College in California, where she stayed for many years. At the same time, her own art began gaining momentum.
Photographs have a deep emotional meaning to Liu, who was forced to burn many childhood family photos under China’s Communist regime. Her paintings often depict real people from historical photographs—sex workers, farm hands, and children during the Great Depression—in new ways. Kim Sajet, director of the National Portrait Gallery, described Liu’s art as “always rooted in history as she transformed marginalized subjects into monumental, heroic, contemporary figures.” The monochrome-painted figures are surrounded by splashes of vibrant color and symbolic images and motifs, creating the illusion of life bursting from Liu’s paintings.
One of Liu’s most famous pieces, “Strange Fruit: Comfort Women” (2001) paints the portraits of Korean women forced into sexual slavery without those of their captors, separating the women’s identities from their circumstances. The painting is a prime example of Liu’s signature technique of dripping linseed oil over the canvas, which looks like a veil of tears. According to Liu’s personal website, these flowing tears of linseed oil depict “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.” As in many of her other paintings, “Strange Fruit: Comfort Women” also uses motifs from traditional Chinese art, butterflies, and pomegranates, to symbolize femininity and pay tribute to the stories of these women and the horror of what they endured.
Liu’s artwork spans cultures and time periods to depict the universal struggles and innate humanity of her subjects. Her series After Lange was inspired by photos taken by Dorothea Lange during the Dust Bowl, which reminded Liu of the famine and war her family had experienced in China and which resembled the likenesses of the Chinese people she had often painted. Liu’s rtwork, above all, honors people who have been lost to history. “I paint from historical photographs of people; the majority of them had no name, no bio, no story left. Nothing. I feel they are kind of lost souls, spirit ghosts,” Liu said. “My painting is a memorial site for them.”
In other works, she merges societal critique with themes such as identity and feminism. Her series Daughters of China (2007) repaints the propaganda film of the same title as a feminist narrative. Resident Alien (1988) is an exploration of immigrant identity in the United States in the form of a satirical rendition of a green card with Liu’s own likeness, renamed “Fortune Cookie.”
Although Liu’s linseed oil-veiled portraits are her most famous works, her artwork encompasses a wide variety of styles and media. In the collections Crime and Punishment (1990) and Confucian Family (1991), hanging canvases are combined with physical shelves, birdcages, and boxes secured on the wall to create a merge of two-dimensional and three-dimensional media. In the 1994 sculpture Jiu Jin Shan (Old Gold Mountain), Liu laid 20,000 fortune cookies on a railroad to symbolize the Chinese immigrants who built the Transcontinental Railroad.
In 2019, the prestigious UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing scheduled an exhibition of Liu’s works. However, Chinese censors objected to nine of the paintings in the collection, one of which was “Avant-Garde.” Although Liu agreed to withdraw the nine pieces, the authorities eventually decided to cancel the show, to her great disappointment.
Liu would go on to win two National Endowment for the Arts Painting Fellowships and have the Hung Liu Endowed Fellowship created in her honor. Her art has been featured in galleries and museums across America, including the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and more.
Liu died in 2021 at the age of seventy-three. She left behind a legacy of great struggle but also triumph. Through her art, she explored her own difficult identity and restored honor and beauty to people who had been forgotten throughout history. Although her paintings display the bleakness and horror of humanity, her art is ultimately hopeful. “It is a story of desperation, of sadness, of uncertainty, of leaving your home,” Liu once said of the American dream and the immigrant experience. “It is also a story of determination, and—more than anything—of hope.”