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Art Forum: Hung Liu (1948–2021)

Art Forum: Hung Liu (1948–2021)

Hung Liu, the pathbreaking Chinese-born American painter who foregrounded the working class, immigrants, and women in haunting, incandescent portraits that mingle Chinese and Western traditions, died August 7 at the age of seventy-three. One of the first Chinese artists to establish a career in the United States, Liu explored the delicate relationship between memory and history in paintings focusing on communities misrepresented or marginalized in official narratives. Her style, typically featuring multilayered brushstrokes and washes of linseed oil, has been characterized by her husband, critic Jack Kelley, as a kind of “weeping realism.”

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