Obituary: Hung Liu (1948–2021)

On August 7, Hung Liu, a pioneering Chinese-born American painter who spent her career giving voice to the marginalized, passed away at the age of 73 from pancreatic cancer, less than three weeks before the opening of her major survey “Portraits of Promised Lands” at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.

Liu was born in Changchun in 1948, one year before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Her childhood was overshadowed by the arrest of her father, a captain in the defeated Kuomintang nationalist army. Years later, she visited the labor camp where he was interned, a scenario she depicted in her 1994 canvas Father’s Day.

Liu was 18 when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, and two years later, she joined the millions of youth in rural “re-education camps.” While laboring in the fields at Dadulianghe Village outside Beijing, Liu disobeyed the Maoist ban on non-sanctioned art, secretly sketching the farmers, villagers, and families she encountered. She also began to take clandestine photographs with a borrowed camera. After four years of hard labor, Liu returned to Beijing to study first at Beijing Teacher’s College, where she was trained to paint in the social realist style. She would go on to study mural painting, in 1979, as a graduate student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, an education Liu likened to “paint[ing]-by-numbers.” Starting in this period, even before the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, she carried paints and brushes hidden in a small box in her coat on trips out to the countryside to create a series of miniature landscape paintings, which she called My Secret Freedom (1972–75). It was a “radical intent,” said her husband, Jeff Kelley, on the series, “to paint not in the service of state ideology or party dicta, but to simply to paint. To paint for the sheer pleasure of painting.”

She eventually obtained a visa to the United States, and in 1984 she enrolled at the University of California San Diego. She based her practice on transforming photographs into new paintings, sublimating the documentary authority of the photographic medium in the more reflective process of painting. In Resident Alien (1988), she recreated her own US residence permit (a “green card”) as a self-portrait, a product of diasporic consciousness that prompts the viewer to examine how her body is caught in the legal, racial, and gender issues presented by immigration. Over the years, she developed a style she called “weeping realism,” in which she first applied thick layers of oil paint before washing the canvas with linseed oil, fragmenting the base layers of paint to recall the erosion of memory and the passage of time.

Her subjects extended beyond her own personal narratives. In Strange Fruit (2001), she repainted a series of photographs of Korean comfort women, memorializing and finally letting them speak as individuals by striking the men they were photographed with from the canvas. Throughout her career, she focused on those at the margins of society, depicting prostitutes, refugees, street performers, laborers, and prisoners to locate their stories in the same landscape of struggle and humanity as everyone else. “I hope to wash my subjects of their exotic ‘otherness’ and reveal them as dignified, even mythic figures on the grander scale of history painting,” she stated. 

Liu was a two-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in painting, and was also honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award in Printmaking from the Southern Graphics Council International in 2011. Her works have been extensively exhibited, and are in the collections of institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. She was professor emerita at Mills College, in Oakland, California, where she had taught since 1990.

Art professionals in museums across the US expressed grief for her passing. “Hung’s work bridged cultures, spanned history, and connected hearts around the world,” wrote Oakland Museum director Lori Fogarty. “Beyond her artistic career and her stunning paintings, Hung was a beloved friend. She was vibrant, funny, playful, and joyous. She was also strong, fierce, and courageous. She was the most generous of people and the hardest working. She painted nearly every day and was continually finding inspiration for her insatiable curiosity and creativity. And she had the ability to make everyone with whom she came in contact feel special and honored. We count ourselves so lucky to have known her.” Liu is survived by her husband, Jeff Kelley, and her son, Ling Chen. 

Suining Sim is ArtAsiaPacific’s editorial intern. 

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