China / United States · 1948–2021
Hung Liu
Painter who rescued anonymous Chinese historical photographs into dripping, luminous canvases.
- Radical
- Intimate
- Labor & Domesticity
Fun fact
She spent four years doing forced agricultural labour during the Cultural Revolution, secretly sketching the workers around her.
How she made it
Oil painted from archival photographs, then flooded with linseed-thinned washes that she lets run down the canvas, the drip deliberately dissolving the documentary image into memory.
- Work
- Lin Hejing Feeding a Crane in a Plum Grove 林和靖养鹤图牙柄团扇, Qing dynasty (1644–1912), 1908
- Medium
- Fan; ink and colors on silk, with bamboo-and- ivory handle
- Collection
- Arts of Asia, Art Institute of Chicago