Lucy Liu swaps camera with canvas for new New York art exhibition exploring family and cultural inheritance

Her inaugural solo exhibition, Unraveling, hosted at New York’s Cast Iron Gallery in 1993, was a photographic showcase that ultimately earned her a prestigious grant to study at Beijing Normal University. It was during this time in China that she retraced her cultural heritage and expanded her understanding of the symbolic potential of visual art. Since that formative period, she has exhibited her work across a globally recognised circuit of galleries, museums, art schools and international art fairs, including the National Museum of Singapore, Objective x Chambers Fine Art in Shanghai and the New York Studio School.

This month, Liu brings her creative evolution back to her hometown for a new solo exhibition at Alisan Fine Arts in New York. Running until June 6, the exhibition, entitled Hard Feelings, features selected works from her ongoing What Was series. The curated collection explores the emotional and psychological terrain of memory, paying acute attention to family ties, cultural inheritance, and the fluid, shifting nature of personal history.

Tatler caught up with Liu to discuss the exhibition and to discover what unique forms of expression the canvas can offer that film cannot capture.

Read more: The Art of Collecting: Daphne King-Yao on carving space for contemporary Chinese art in Hong Kong

For an audience that knows you so intimately through the moving image, what parts of your internal landscape do you feel painting captures that acting or directing simply cannot reach?
It allows me to sit with memories and emotions that don’t always have clear language or resolution. There’s something intimate about the process because nothing is being performed or explained—it’s simply an honest reflection of what’s underneath.

What does this exhibition Hard Feelings reveal about your own upbringing and personal life?
Growing up in an immigrant family, there was often an unspoken instinct toward endurance and survival rather than emotional reflection. Working on this series forced me to confront a great deal of discomfort, but it also gave me a deeper understanding of the quiet sacrifices carried by previous generations. I came to see how love, duty and misunderstanding can exist simultaneously within a family. The exhibition doesn’t attempt to reconcile those contradictions—it simply makes space for them to exist honestly.

Alisan Fine Arts has a history of championing the Chinese diaspora and contemporary Asian art. How does it feel to anchor your work within a gallery that holds such deep cultural weight?
It feels incredibly meaningful. Alisan Fine Arts has spent decades creating space for Asian and diasporic artists to be seen with nuance and seriousness. There’s a sense of lineage and cultural continuity there that I deeply respect. It’s special to place this work in a context that understands both the personal and cultural layers. The gallery has such a thoughtful legacy of honouring complexity within Asian identity, and I’m grateful to be part of that conversation.

From a curatorial perspective, how did you choose to space and arrange these specific pieces from the What Was series to guide the viewer through the emotional and psychological terrain of your memory?
I wanted the exhibition to show a sense of evolution between the works. Some of the paintings are connected to earlier pieces from previous series, so viewers can see where the newer works originated and how certain ideas continued to develop over time. There are also traces of paintings being covered or painted over, which became important to the process because they reflect the way memory and experience accumulate in layers. The newer works feel more reductive and exposed—stripped back in a way that reveals something more unresolved.

How do you mentally navigate switching between the isolation of the studio and the high-energy demands of Hollywood?
They actually balance each other beautifully. Film sets are collaborative and outward-facing, while my studio is more about personal discipline and introspection. Painting gives me a way to metabolise experience privately before stepping back into the intensity of production.

What do you hope the younger generation of Asian-American creatives takes away from your multi-disciplinary path?
I hope younger creatives feel empowered not to limit themselves to one lane. You don’t have to choose between disciplines or identities. Creativity is expansive, and your perspective is valuable precisely because it’s unique.

As an actor and filmmaker, what roles would you like to portray in the future?
I’m interested in roles that are layered and evolving—women who are not afraid to be contradictory and searching. I’m increasingly drawn to complexity rather than perfection.

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