Missing Parts, 1992

Hung Liu grew up in urban Beijing, where she attended school until 1968. The Cultural Revolution of Communist China interrupted her studies by forcing her into the countryside, where she spent four years working in the fields. She eventually returned to Beijing, completing her BFA at the Beijing Teachers College in 1975. She went on to study mural painting at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, where she earned an MFA and subsequently joined the faculty. Liu’s artistic training in China strictly adhered to the ideals of Russian Social Realism. Anxious to escape these artistic limitations, Liu left China in 1984 to earn a second MFA at the University of California, San Diego, where she worked with conceptual artist Alan Kaprow. Liu later taught at the University of North Texas at Denton, the University of Texas at Arlington, and then Mills College in Oakland.

Liu’s work draws on her training in socialist realism as well as her studies with Kaprow by incorporating found or made objects into her otherwise two-dimensional paintings. Through this hybrid style, Liu critiques both Chinese and American political policies and cultural practices, particularly the denigration of women. Liu has won several awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts Painting Fellowships. Her work, Missing Parts, created at Island Press, is now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Liu is also represented in the collections of the National Museum of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Liu’s visit to Island Press was generously supported in part by the Women’s Society of Washington University in St. Louis.