Hung Liu. Jazz Painter

Like a jazz musician—to whom the artist often compares herself—Hung Liu approaches painting as improvisation and performance. She mixes paint with linseed oil to yield thin, flowing drips; her lines are gestural and rhythmic. “There is a connection in how you think, your mind, and your muscle memory. It’s a bit like dancing.”¹ Though she often starts from photographs, her paintings transform such images to capture a tension between realism and abstraction. Liu’s graduate work under conceptual artist Allan Kaprow at the University of California, San Diego, freed up her method. Rather than refine drafts, as she did working in the perfectionist style of Chinese socialist realism, she “discovers gradually in the process of making.”² Fluctuation has become central to her work, which she attributes to participating in Kaprow’s Happenings.³ Liu’s 2013 live performance and video Four Cantos at the San José Museum of Art manifested the spontaneous and generative qualities of her typically studio-based painting practice.