In 1972, Liu was allowed to attend college in Beijing, where she studied until 1975. Following graduation, she attended graduate school at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Socialist Realism supplied the guiding principles at both schools, and there was very little room for deviation. Still, Liu found a way to retain a measure of personal expression by studying ancient cave drawings and Buddhist iconography. She often tucked two symbols of hope, a lotus flower and crane, into her paintings.

Remembering is the real thing. Otherwise, (our memories) will be really dead. Dead, really gone. I think we need to leave the door open to remember. I could only do so much, my tiny bit.

—Hung Liu in interview with Letha Ch’ien, in 2021

But Liu remained determined to leave China, and after a four-year legal process, attained permission to emigrate to the United States in 1984. She left behind her mother and young son, who would eventually join her in California. Liu attended the University of California, San Diego, where she studied under Allan Kaprow, the American originator of Happenings. She continued to use the Socialist Realist style in which she was trained in China throughout her career.

Known for paintings based on historical Chinese photographs, Hung Liu’s subjects over the years have been prostitutes, refugees, street performers, soldiers, laborers, and prisoners, among others. 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. 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.