Hung Liu explores and uncovers the personal narratives that have been shaped and influenced by socio-political and historical events in China through her works.
Hung Liu was born in Changchun, China in 1948 and died in 2021 in Oakland, California, 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. She currently lives in Oakland, California. 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. She has written: “I want to both preserve and destroy the image.“ In effect, Liu turns old photographs into new paintings.