RIP Hung Liu (Artist): 1948-2021

Kelliu52, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Hung Liu was born in China. She came to the United States in 1984 to attend UCSD. She stayed, ultimately becoming a U.S. citizen and a teacher at Mills College in California.

Hung Liu was a visual artist. An immigrant herself, the subjects of Hung Liu’s paintings included, among other topics, refugees and immigrants.

Her online bio describes her works in distinctly poetic terms:

Known for paintings based on historical Chinese photographs…. [m]uch 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 has invented 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. She summons the ghosts of history to the present. In effect, Liu turns old photographs into new paintings.

“Weeping realism.” Wow.

I urge you to click through to see some of her amazing work. Check out, for example, Resident Alien from 1988. It’s oil on canvas, 60 x 90, and can be found in person at the San Jose Museum of Art. It’s a rendition of the artist’s own green card. Or look at her series Chinese in Idaho to find yourself transported back in U.S. history to an immigration story you likely haven’t thought about before.

Hung Liu died earlier this month in Oakland California. 

-KitJ