Hung Liu was born in Changchun, China in 1948, growing up under the Maoist regime. Initially trained in the Socialist Realist style, Liu studied mural painting as a graduate student at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, before immigrating to the US in 1984 to attend the University of California, San Diego, where she studied under Allan Kaprow, the American originator of Happenings. Hung Liu’s resin paintings are hybrids of the painting and printmaking processes, composed of many alternating layers of resin and oil-based pigment. The glass like surfaces with a metallic base result in complex paintings bearing a three-dimensional aspect and depth. Hung Liu has been exploring the courage and strength of women in her paintings throughout her career, Liu continues to delve into social, political, historical aspects of China's past regimes as "subject" for her works, using old photographs as source material. As a bi-cultural citizen, she is in a position to re-present and re-examine Chinese culture, past and present, while combining images from her own life experience. Korean comfort woman during the Japanese war, concubines, war heroines, as well as, victims of the Sichuan earthquake are the subjects that show a haunting yet somehow nostalgic presence in her paintings. Layering symbolism into her works is as well a unique characteristic of her paintings. Hung Liu will be having a solo retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Museum in 2021.