Addison Miller, 2025 Curation Department Intern
The FWMoA Teen Council is showing their curated exhibit, Echoes of Home, now on view until July 27th. This gallery is filled with portrayals of the memories, meals, and moments of rest associated with home. One image that stands out is this lithograph, titled, Route 66 by Hung Liu.
Hung Liu (1948–2021) was a Chinese American artist whose work explored time, geography, and identity. Best known for portraits layered with dripping paint and symbolism, she reimagined history’s forgotten figures and gave them renewed dignity. Drawing on her own life during the Cultural Revolution and her emigration to the United States, Liu created art deeply rooted in memory, resilience, and the passage of time.
Born in Changchun, China, Liu grew up during Mao Zedong’s Communist regime. At the height of the Cultural Revolution, she was sent to the countryside for four years of “proletarian re-education,” laboring in rice fields seven days a week. There, she began sketching her neighbors and taking photographs—a practice which ended up defining her life’s work. In 1979, she entered the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where she studied mural painting within the restrictive style of Socialist Realism.
Liu’s transformation began in 1984 when she emigrated to California to study at the University of California, San Diego. Immersed in conceptual art and surrounded by diverse perspectives, Liu found a new visual language that combined realism with abstraction, and history with interpretation. She became fascinated by the tension between the truth of a photograph and the interpretive nature of painting, which became central to her work. Liu’s signature style involves reinterpreting historical photographs—many depicting anonymous individuals—through large-scale paintings veiled in dripping linseed oil, which evokes the erosion of memory and the distortion of time. “I create or try to portray and preserve images but also destroy or dissolve them,” Liu once said. “There is no way we can fully preserve anything.” Her paintings often appear as if they’re melting—visual metaphors for the impermanence of history.
Her process embraced spontaneity as part of its message. In painting, Liu diluted her pigments with oil, allowing gravity to dictate their flow down the canvas. In etching, she dripped acid onto copper plates, mimicking the same effect. Even in more controlled forms, like woodblock printing and tapestry, she carved jagged lines or wove colorful threads to replicate the look of flowing pigment. Though appearing spontaneous, her decisions were carefully considered, balancing chance and control. Liu’s subjects ranged from prostitutes and refugees to soldiers, street performers, and prisoners—people erased from official historical records. She painted these figures as fully realized human beings. “I hope to wash my subjects of their ‘otherness’ and reveal them as dignified, even mythic figures on the grander scale of history painting,” she explained. Her work gave voice to the overlooked, blending the historical and personal with deep compassion.
Around 2015, Liu shifted her focus from Chinese subjects to American ones, inspired by the Depression-era photography of Dorothea Lange. She was especially drawn to images of families displaced by the Dust Bowl, recognizing in them the same struggle and strength she had experienced in her own life. As an immigrant, Liu identified with their search for survival, belonging, and hope. One of her most poignant works from this period is the 2015 lithograph Route 66. Named after the highway that carried thousands of displaced families westward in the 1930s, the piece reinterprets Lange’s photograph of children resting on a mattress in the back of a truck. This image is overlaid with a close-up of a dandelion, its seeds blowing away in the wind. The combination of imagery transforms the work into a meditation on migration, chance, and endurance. Just as the wind scatters dandelion seeds across unknown terrain, so too are migrants cast into unfamiliar landscapes, uncertain of where they will land. Liu saw the dandelion as a powerful metaphor: “It was tragic and hopeful at the same time,” she said. “It was about the passing of time and chance because you never know where you may land… So migrants over many centuries are like dandelion seeds. They take a chance, generation after generation.” In Route 66, Liu connects the personal and political, linking her own experience as an immigrant to a larger human history of displacement and survival.
Over her career, Liu earned significant recognition, including two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and the Joan Mitchell Fellowship. In 2021, she became the first Asian American woman to receive a solo exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Her work is held in major collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Beyond awards, Liu’s legacy lies in her ability to humanize history, honoring forgotten people. Through her layered, fluid style, she made space for memory to breathe, erode, and persist. She reminded us that history is never fixed and that art can bridge the gap between past and present. Liu passed away in 2021, yet her influence lives on in museums, classrooms, and the hearts of viewers who see in her work a reflection of their own stories. Through her work, Liu made the invisible visible.
To see this work and other interpretations of home, visit FWMoA to see Echoes of Home, on view through July 27th.
Works Cited
Fort Wayne Museum of Art. “Treasures from the Vault: Hung Liu.” FWMoA Blog, 23 Aug. 2021, https://fwmoa.blog/2021/08/23/treasures-from-the-vault-hung-liu/.
National Museum of Women in the Arts. “Artist Spotlight: Hung Liu—Restoring Memory.” NMWA Blog, 11 Aug. 2021, https://nmwa.org/blog/artist-spotlight/hung-liu-restoring-memory/.
Liu, Hung. “Biography.” Hung Liu Official Website, https://www.hungliu.com/artist/biography. Accessed 19 June 2025.
Ryan Lee Gallery. “Hung Liu.” RYAN LEE, https://ryanleegallery.com/artists/hung-liu/. Accessed 19 June 2025.