Artist & Museum: Hung Liu

May 16, 2026 – May 1, 2027

Chinese-born American painter, Hung Liu (1948–2021), transforms historical photographs into richly layered paintings that move between history and memory. Trained in China as a Social Realist painter, she immigrated to the United States in 1984, where she embraced a more experimental approach to image-making. Working from historical photographs—often of overlooked or marginalized individuals—Liu developed a painterly language of washes and drips that both preserve and dissolve the image. In her work, the photograph as document erodes into memory: personal, cultural, and collective. 

The UW Art Museum shared a lasting relationship with the artist, hosting two exhibitions of her work: The Vanishing: Re-presenting the Chinese in the American West (2006) and Hung Liu: American Exodus (2017). Across multiple visits to Laramie, Liu worked closely with students, faculty, and the broader community through lectures, workshops, and conversations, returning to a place that became an ongoing site of artistic exchange. 

Each exhibition was shaped by Liu’s engagement with historical archives. For The Vanishing, she drew from vintage photographs housed in the American Heritage Center documenting Chinese railroad workers in Wyoming. One such image inspired China Mary II, a painting that brings together regional history and Liu’s visual language. Within the work, references to Wyoming—such as Indian Paintbrush and the Western Meadowlark—are interwoven with Chinese imagery, grounding the figure in both place and memory. 

Liu turned to the Dust Bowl-era photographs of American documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, for American Exodus, reinterpreting iconic images of migration and labor in the United States during the Great Depression. From this exhibition, the museum acquired Not in Kansas and Cotton Hoer, 1936, thereby extending Liu’s exploration of displacement, resilience, and identity.   

Hung Liu has an extensive international exhibition history and is represented in major museum collections nationwide. Presented as part of the museum’s collection framework, this installation reflects how works of art enter the collection through sustained relationships—shaped by exhibitions, research, and ongoing collaboration between artist and museum.