di Rosa’s New Work series offers the public an opportunity to encounter new and recent works by important Bay Area artists. As a painter, Hung Liu challenges the documentary authority of historical Chinese photographs by subjecting them to a more reflective process of painting. Much of the meaning of her painting comes from the way the washes and drips dissolve the documentary images, suggesting the passage of memory into history, while working to uncover the cultural and personal narratives fixed–but-often-concealed in the photographic instant. She has written: “I want to both preserve and destroy the image.”
