Liu (February 7, 1948 – August 7, 2021) is known for her paintings drawn from Chinese historical photography and often depicts such elemental human activities as laboring, eating, journeying, leaping, fighting and dreaming. With an overlay of traditional Chinese birds, flowers, insects, dragons, and stylized human figures, Liu offers her subjects artistic evidence of their own rich heritage – as if to remind or comfort them. The photorealism of the works is tempered by Liu’s technique of diluting her paint with linseed oil, which is then dripped onto the surface, blurring and distorting the portrait. The painting becomes akin to a memory image, and much of the meaning of Liu’s painting comes from the way the washes and drips dissolve the photo-based images, working to uncover the cultural and personal narratives. Liu’s works have been exhibited extensively and collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and the Los Angeles County Museum, among others.