Chinese history has predominated Hung Liu’s work throughout her career. Born and raised in Beijing during Mao’s Great Leap Forward and trained in the Social Realist tradition, Liu’s paintings are now transformed into a new and vibrant series of tapestries. Liu describes her works by saying, “I hope to wash the subject of its exotic ‘otherness’ and reveal it as a dignified, even mythic figure.” Liu’s tapestries reveal the beauty and heroism in the labors of an anonymous women from China’s past. Drawing inspiration from history, old photographs and her own experiences, this series of exquisitely produced tapestries join Hung Liu with artist tapestries of Picasso, Kandinsky, Warhol and more recently Chuck Close, Craigie Horsefield and William Kentridge in exploring this medium as a contemporary art form.

Hung Liu is one of the most prominent Chinese painters working in the United States today. Born in Changchun, China, in 1948, a year before the creation of the People's Republic of China, Liu lived through Maoist China and experienced the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Trained as a social realist painter and muralist, she came to the United States in 1984 to attend the University of California, San Diego, where she received her MFA. One of the first people from mainland China to study abroad and pursue an art career, she moved to northern California to become a faculty member at Mills College in 1990, and has continued to live and work in the Bay Area. She has exhibited internationally at premier museums and galleries, and her work resides in prestigious private and institutional collections around the world. Hung Liu currently lives in Oakland and is a tenured professor in the Art Department at Mills College.

Image: © Hung Liu, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery