Curated by René de Guzman

Hung Liu’s debut retrospective of more than eighty works will juxtapose her socialist-realist sketches from the 1970s, made while the artist was still living in China and at the height of the Cultural Revolution, with paintings realized since her immigration to the United States in 1984. Liu has an affinity for portraits—her luminous canvases drip with the likenesses of children, laborers, and the elderly, many depicted in timeless, ambiguous environments—and while her symbolism and pictorial narratives convey painterly reflections on a haunted past, her works stir the collective memory of American audiences in their visualization of the traumas of cultural assimilation. Liu’s life experience and wide-ranging technical repertoire will be explored in the show’s catalogue, in essays by de Guzman, Bill Berkson, Stephanie Hanor, Wu Hung, Yiyun Li, and Karen Smith.

— Lee Ambrozy