BIOGRAPHY

Hung Liu (b. 1948, Changchun, China – d. 2021, Oakland, CA) grew up in China under Mao’s regime, where her artmaking was initially constrained to Socialist Realist and mural painting. In 1984, Liu left China to attend graduate school at the University of California, San Diego, where she began implementing fluid materiality and surrealist visual strategies in her art. Her later works often dissolve historical Chinese photographs of overlooked subjects—prostitutes, refugees, street performers, soldiers, laborers, and prisoners—suggesting the passage of memory into history. Liu’s works have been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, DC; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, MO; Muscarelle Museum of Art, VA; National Portrait Gallery, DC; New Museum, NY; San Antonio Museum of Art, TX; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Tokyo Photographic Museum, Japan; and Winter Palace of Beijing, China, among others. Her work is in the collections of 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, DC; National Museum of Women in the Arts, DC; National Portrait Gallery, DC; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; and de Young Museum, CA, among others.