Art & Exhibitions
Lucy Liu Paints the ‘Emotional Truth’ of Family Memories
At Alisan Fine Arts, new paintings by the actor and artist see her confronting her past through the lens of the present.
At the heart of Lucy Liu’s new show at Alisan Fine Arts in New York is a portrait of a family. Parents pose behind three young children in an idyllic park, the picture of domestic togetherness. Yet, the image resists clarity. The figures’ faces dissolve into a blur, their outlines waver as though half-remembered or softened by time. Memory, the work suggests, is an unstable thing.
“It’s built in layers, and it changes depending on where you’re standing,” Liu told me over email. “When I layer or obscure something, it’s not about hiding it—it’s about acknowledging that we never have full access to the original moment.”
Still, it’s not stopped the painter from attempting to grasp at these moments in works that reflect exactly that inaccessibility. Liu’s latest outing, aptly titled “Hard Feelings,” surfaces recent paintings that mine a personal narrative, filtered through the gauze of memory. But unlike the representational Family Portrait (2016)—which was first unveiled at a 2023 New York Studio School exhibition—Liu’s subsequent works are looser, more gestural, with more layers disrupting the surface.
They emerge from processes that mirror the act of remembering, Liu noted. “You see fragments, traces, something partially revealed,” she explained. “That feels closer to how memory actually exists.”
Excavating the Past
Liu, of course, is among the most recognizable faces in Hollywood. In 1998, she broke out for her role in the comedy-drama series Ally McBeal, before going on to star in Charlie’s Angels (2000), Kill Bill (2003–04), and beloved crime drama Elementary (2012–19). But throughout, she’s developed a rigorous visual art practice that ranges across mediums.
Where her first solo exhibition in 1993, at New York’s Cast Iron Gallery, introduced her photographs, subsequent shows spotlit her sculptures (“Totem” at the Popular Institute in Manchester in 2013) and collages (included in “Unhomed Belongings” at the National Museum of Singapore in 2019). In recent years, following her studies at the New York Studio School from 2004 to 2007, her paintings have come to the fore.
“They’re very different energies,” Liu said of her approaches to performance and visual art, adding that while the former is more collaborative, the latter is more solitary and exploratory. “They activate different impulses. One is outward-facing and communicative in a direct way, and the other is more internal, more intuitive. But I think they inform each other in subtle ways.”
A decade ago, following the death of her father, Liu excavated her family photographs to confront and process difficult childhood memories. These images—and emotions—would become source material for Family Portrait, as well as her “what was” series, which unpacks the complex, rocky landscape of her own history, identity, and inheritance.
“Those experiences are foundational,” Liu said of that autobiographical thread. “They’re not something I step outside of—they’re something I’m constantly moving through.”
Unresolving the Past
What Was (2023) and What Stays (2023) center on Liu’s mother, shown as a young woman following her immigration to the U.S. Her figure is outlined against layered backdrops of urban and familial surroundings, suggesting shifting contexts and presences.
Liu’s parents also show up in Hourglass (2026), delineated against a graphically rendered building and blurry tints, and in 1965 (2026), where their faces are obscured by a childlike drawing. They’re compositions that seem placid on the surface, but with a subtle tension and ambiguity. Her parents in Hourglass are faintly shadowed by her maternal grandparents; in Stones in the Sun (2026), her father is depicted beneath a burst of red and orange forms that’s at once radiant and explosive.
It’s not just the passing of time that has refracted Liu’s memories and history—her own experience of motherhood has colored the generational aspect of her work. Motherhood has “shifted my sense of time and responsibility,” she said. “It’s made me more aware of legacy, good and bad, and of what gets passed down and what gets reinterpreted.”
Painting, for Liu, isn’t meant to reconcile her feelings about the past. Rather, it’s “a way to sit with those questions without needing to resolve them,” she said. She’s happy for her new works to exist amid discomfort and uncertainty—for her memories to “surface as they are,” without the benefit of rose-colored glasses. It’s an emotional candor that gives her compositions an unusual force.
“It’s about finding the emotional truth of something without needing to explain it literally,” Liu said. “What I’m more interested in is the feeling that remains after memory has settled. That’s what I choose to reveal. The rest can stay unspoken.”
“Lucy Liu: Hard Feelings” is on view at Alisan Fine Arts, 120 East 65th Street, New York, May 14–June 6.