Hung Liu Chinese, 1948-2021

Hung Liu (b. Changchun, China, 1948 – d. Oakland, California, 2021) was a groundbreaking contemporary artist known for her powerful paintings based primarily on historical Chinese photographs, and her installations addressing the racial and cultural complexities she witnessed upon immigrating to the United States at the age of 36.

In 2023, Liu’s work was the subject of a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, titled Hung Liu: Witness. In 2021, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery organized Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands, a retrospective look at the artist’s portraits. Curated by the museum’s former curator of painting and sculpture Dorothy Moss, this was the first solo show by an Asian American woman in the museum’s history. Liu died of pancreatic cancer just three weeks before the show opened in Washington. Liu’s work is currently the subject of Remembering Artist Hung Liu at the Oakland Museum of California.

In 2013, the Oakland Museum of California organized Summoning Ghosts: The Art and Life of Hung Liu, which traveled through 2015. In a review of that show, The Wall Street Journal called Liu “the greatest Chinese painter in the U.S.” A two-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in painting, Liu also received a Lifetime Achievement Award in Printmaking from the Southern Graphics Council International in 2011.

Liu’s works have been exhibited extensively and collected by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; and Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, among others. At her death, Liu was Professor Emerita at Mills College, in Oakland, California, where she taught since 1990.