The Phillips Collects: Hung Liu

Refugee: Woman and Children is the first work by Hung Liu to enter the collection.

Hung Liu (b. Changchun, China, 1948; d. Oakland, CA, 2021) came of age under the communist regime of Mao Zedong. In her early 20s, Liu labored for four years in fields as part of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. She began her formal training in China in the 1970s, then, after emigrating to the US in 1984, began a decades-long teaching career. Liu is known for her large-scale paintings of women, courtesans, refugees, children, and laborers from pre-revolutionary China. Often working from faded black-and-white photographs, she transformed images of once anonymous figures into intimate and deeply empathetic portraits. Refugee: Woman and Children is representative of this body of work. The painting enhances the museum’s holdings of works that tell the story of displacement, such as Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Benny Andrews’s Trail of Tears.