Lucy Liu’s latest artwork speaks on motherhood, identity, and immigration

For much of her career, Lucy Liu has been asked to step into other people’s stories.

She has been the razor-sharp lawyer Ling Woo on Ally McBeal, the glamorous crime fighter Alex Munday in Charlie’s Angels, the lethal O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill, and the sassy Simone Grove in Why Women Kill. More recently, in Rosemead, Liu stars as Irene, a terminally ill Chinese immigrant single mother navigating her teenage son’s escalating mental health crisis.

But long before many viewers knew her through these roles, Liu had already been building a life as an artist. She began making art at 16 and later exhibited her work under her Chinese name, Yu Ling. Painting, sculpture, collage, silkscreen and installation have formed a parallel creative practice, one less tied to the velocity of Hollywood and more attuned to her personal feelings, memories and what the body stores before language catches up.

In Lucy Liu: Hard Feelings, which opened at Alisan Fine Arts in New York last month and will be on view through Saturday, Liu turns to one of the most intimate and complicated archives available to any artist: family photographs. Centered on works from her ongoing What Was series, the exhibition began in 2017 after the death of Liu’s father, a loss that prompted her to revisit images from childhood and examine the emotional undertow beneath them. “Any photograph captures a single moment, but it cannot fully hold the tensions, sacrifices, or emotional realities that shaped it,” Liu tells JoySauce. “After my father passed away, I found myself returning to these images differently. I wasn’t searching for answers so much as trying to understand what was absent. The photographs became less about documentation and more like invitations to reflect on the stories we inherit.”

That absence sits at the center of Hard Feelings. The paintings do not treat family photographs as stable evidence. Instead, Liu uses them as unstable portals, places where memory, grief, longing, resentment, tenderness, and cultural inheritance blur together. An image may appear to offer proof that something happened, but Liu is more interested in what a photograph cannot say: what was felt, what was endured, what was hidden, and what was softened for survival.

In “Family Portrait” (2016), Liu works from the familiar structure of a family snapshot: five figures posed outdoors, their bodies still legible against a green park setting. But she refuses the photograph’s claim to clarity. The faces are left blank, nearly swallowed by thick, agitated brushwork, turning the portrait into something less like documentation than emotional residue. The result is not a clean record of family, but a portrait of how memory protects, distorts and partially erases.

By contrast, in newer works such as “Hourglass” (2026), Liu adopts a more restrained and linear visual language. The figures are no longer fully submerged beneath paint; they emerge through contour, spacing and reduction. A faint imprint of her maternal grandparents appears behind her parents, suggesting ancestry not as a fixed background but as an undetachable presence. The shift suggests a different kind of recollection: less defensive, more distilled, as if Liu is no longer trying to obscure the past but to understand its emotional shape. “In my earlier work, obscuring the figures felt instinctive,” Liu says. “I think that process was also a form of emotional protection, allowing the image to dissolve or remain partially hidden. In the newer paintings, allowing the lines and figures to remain more visible reflects a more reductive approach, one that creates space for conflicting emotions to coexist, particularly love and tension. Painting allows me to honor what can be seen and what remains unresolved.”

That tension may feel familiar to many children of immigrants. The child of Chinese immigrants, Liu grew up in Queens, New York, speaking Mandarin at home and not learning English until she was 5. “I think many children of immigrants carry a deep respect for the sacrifices their parents made, and with that can come an unspoken desire to protect them and preserve a certain narrative,” Liu says. “Gratitude is an important part of that story, but it doesn’t erase its complexity. It’s important for me to hold my family’s resilience while also acknowledging the difficult emotions that were part of that history.”

That complexity comes into sharper focus in “What Was” (2023) and “What Stays” (2023), in which Liu draws from archival images of her mother after immigrating to the United States. The figure of her mother becomes an anchoring presence, surrounded by traces, partial figures, and overlapping spaces. She is there and not there, visible and unreachable, both mother and young woman navigating the new country. The works ask viewers to consider how immigration changes the way a family remembers itself: What is kept? What is left behind? What is translated, mistranslated, or never spoken?

For Liu, becoming a mother has also changed the way she sees her own mother. “Motherhood has deepened my understanding of the invisible emotional weight that so many women carry,” she says. “I’ve reflected on what she navigated as an immigrant woman raising a family in a new country, in a language that wasn’t her native tongue.”

That may be why the maternal figure in Hard Feelings feels so alive. She is not simply a symbol of sacrifice. Liu allows her to be more human: a woman reading on the sofa with a cigarette in hand, a woman who places her left hand over her heart when taking photos. 

The exhibition’s title, Hard Feelings, resists easy resolution. In everyday speech, “no hard feelings” is what people say when they want to smooth over conflict, to suggest that whatever happened can be left behind. Liu does the opposite. She allows difficult memories to remain difficult, without forcing them into a cleaner story of healing, gratitude or closure. 

The exhibition does not ask viewers to recognize Liu as the movie star on screen. It asks them to sit with Liu as daughter, mother, immigrant’s child and artist, looking back at old photographs and realizing that the past is never only what happened. It is also what was hidden, what was carried and what still asks to be felt.

“For me, art is about transforming what feels isolating into something that reminds us we are not alone,” she says.