LUCY LIU

Liu’s series began in 2017, following the death of her father. The event prompted her to revisit an archive of family photographs and to confront complex emotions surrounding a sometimes difficult childhood. As she processed these memories—childhood moments and lived fragments—she began using these images as source material for her paintings. The series began with Family Portrait, first shown in her 2023 solo exhibition at the New York Studio School. As curator Kara Carmack described, “a family of five stands motionless in a park, posing for a camera. The group’s classical pyramidal composition connotes closeness and stability. Yet the faces of impasto swirls and the energetic brushstrokes capture the murky, impermanent edges of memory and affect.”

While Family Portrait reflects an early approach rooted in representation, it ultimately proves to be an outlier within the series. Liu continues to draw from family photographs, but in subsequent works, she begins to cover her initial renderings with contrasting imagery executed in loose, expressive brushstrokes. Any trace of the original image dissolves into sweeping gestures and dense accumulations of paint. Through this process, Liu foregrounds the instability of memory: rather than fixed, her references undergo continual transformation, layered, disrupted, and partially erased. These canvases function as evolving surfaces, where traces of earlier compositions remain embedded, creating tension between what is visible and what is obscured.

More recent paintings introduce a sharper, more defined visual language. What Was and What Stays draw from archival images of Liu’s mother following her immigration to the United States. In these works, the outlined figure of her mother anchors the composition, around which Liu stages encounters between presence and absence—partial figures, erased companions, and overlapping spaces that evoke what remains alongside what has disappeared.

This shift reflects a renewed engagement with family history, shaped in part by the artist’s evolving understanding of motherhood and generational experience. In Hourglass and 1965, both of her parents appear in compositions that are more linear, graphic, and marked by restraint and reduction. In the latter, a faint imprint of her maternal grandparents emerges behind them. Liu attributes this visual language to her process of recollection, in which memories are distilled to their core and her parents are understood as young individuals with ambitions and lives preceding the formation of the family. As Carmack observes, “Unlike the earlier body of work, these paintings retain rather than obscure the referents of Liu’s past, generously and honestly delving into the complexities of her autobiography.”

Throughout the exhibition, Liu navigates the space between memory and imagination, allowing autobiographical material to surface. The paintings suggest that memory is not recovered intact, but continuously reconstructed—reshaped by time, emotion, and perspective. The title, Hard Feelings, resists a singular interpretation: rather than signaling resolution, it points to the difficulty of feeling itself. Emotions emerge as uneven, layered, and at times inaccessible—resistant to articulation, yet persistently present. Liu’s paintings trace this complexity, where feelings cannot always be fully grasped or expressed. The works remain open-ended, holding together conflicting sensations of attachment, distance, forgiveness, and compassion. They invite viewers to reflect on their own relationships to memory and the ways in which the past persists in the present.