Hung Liu, artist who blended East and West, is dead at 73

Hung Liu, a Chinese American artist whose work merged past and present, East and West, earning her acclaim in her adopted country and censorship in the land of her birth, died Aug. 7 at her home in Oakland, California. She was 73. The cause was pancreatic cancer, Nancy Hoffman Gallery, which represents Liu in New York, said in a statement. Her death came less than three weeks before the scheduled opening of a career survey, “Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands,” at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. She was the first Asian American woman to have a solo exhibition there. “Five-thousand-year-old culture on my back; late-twentieth-century world in my face” is how Liu described her life-changing arrival in the United States from China in 1984, when she was 36 and an accomplished painter. Her goal in America, she once said, was “to invent a way of allowing myself to practice

Hung Liu, a Chinese American artist whose work merged past and present, East and West, earning her acclaim in her adopted country and censorship in the land of her birth, died Aug. 7 at her home in Oakland, California. She was 73. The cause was pancreatic cancer, Nancy Hoffman Gallery, which represents Liu in New York, said in a statement. Her death came less than three weeks before the scheduled opening of a career survey, “Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands,” at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. She was the first Asian American woman to have a solo exhibition there. “Five-thousand-year-old culture on my back; late-twentieth-century world in my face” is how Liu described her life-changing arrival in the United States from China in 1984, when she was 36 and an accomplished painter. Her goal in America, she once said, was “to invent a way of allowing myself to practice