Un-forgetting History

with Hung Liu

After having to burn her family pictures during the Cultural Revolution, Chinese-American artist Hung Liu treasures old photographs all the more. In fact, they’re foundational to her work as an artist. She has described her portraits in terms of a memorial site for people forgotten to history-- comfort women, farm workers, refugees.

As the Gallery launches a retrospective of her work, we trace Hung's life through some of the images she's collected and created, from her rendering of a 'green card' in which she renames herself 'Fortune Cookie,' to her painting commemorating the violent Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Detail photo of an Asian woman in a black shirt

Hung Liu in her studio with Rat Year 2020 [detail] | Photo by John Janca