Notes

Hung Liu is an American contemporary artist who was born in China. Her work is inspired by the stories of pain, anguish, and lives of the people she paints. Each piece is created by Hung Liu getting inside the minds of the subject portrayed in the pictures she uses. As an artist, she feels that it's her job to live the lives of every person that she paints. In doing so, she has an emotional connection with the people she paints, and cares about all of them as if they were her.

The reason her work is unique is that she dilutes her paint using linseed oil which forces the paint to run and to distort the image that she creates. She does this to represent the truth behind history and how we actually perceive it. Her paintings have a deeper meaning than meets the eye, which forces the viewer to visualize not only about each person that is painted, but about history in general. By distorting the paintings intentionally, she gives history a tamperable feel. Things are not always pictured as how they were.

It's extremely important that Hung Liu paints using oil because that is her trademark. She is known for her linseed oil trickled paintings and while she could possibly be still an amazing artist without it, shes better off continuing with it.

One of the biggest controversies that Hung Liu experiences is her methods of painting vs how China forced her to paint. In the socialist era of China that she comes from, painting was done for the recording of history of people that painted China in a better light and was supposed to be realism. While for the most part, she does still use a lot of realism techniques, she uses her own style of painting to alter the image.

An american artist that I consider to possess some of the same concepts as Hung Liu, is Richard Young. Like Hung liu, Richard young also uses subjects who are in "mythic poses". While Richard Young doesn't seem to delve as deeply into his subjects, there is a lot of emotion behind each painting that he creates. Like Hung Liu, Richard also likes to challenge himself by not creating the same image repeatedly. Attached is a piece call "Chastity" which gives off a very passionate feel.