Artist Hung Liu once told an audience of students, “China is my homeland. An American is something that I'm always becoming – it's a verb” (194). Liu's life and art are a compelling reflection of late twentieth-century social, political, and cultural history in her two countries. Not surprisingly, this substantial catalog for her 2013 retrospective at the Oakland Museum of California takes the approach of investigating her art in relation to key moments in her life. Liu was born in China in 1948 during the civil war and at the age of twenty, during the Cultural Revolution, was sent for “reeducation,” working in rice and wheat fields for four years. Later she attended the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and studied mural painting in the sanctioned socialist realist style – which Liu has called “socialist surrealism,” as it was more fantasy and romanticism than realism. For four years in the early 1980s, she patiently lobbied the Chinese government for a passport to study at the University of California, San Diego. There, the seminal artist Alan Kaprow upended her previous studies by emphasizing process and experience, conceptual approaches to material and injecting the everyday into art.

In 1988, Liu was invited to do a residency at Capp Street Projects in San Francisco and the resulting exhibition and installation, Resident Alien, was a turning point. The paintings, drawings, and objects poignantly explored the history of Chinese immigration to California and contemporary issues of identity and cultural hybridity. Two years later, Liu took a position at Mills College in Oakland and became known for paintings which draw upon photographs from Chinese history, collaged and reimagined by the artist in an increasingly fluid, active painting style. In Liu's successful career of museum and gallery exhibitions, public commissions and private collections, this catalog is one of the most comprehensive, with eighty works and essays by six impressive authors. The contributors are either from the Bay Area or from similar backgrounds to Liu's – further enhancing the overall biographical thread. Art historian Wu Hung focusses on four crucial moments in Liu's life and work, and provides insights drawn from his knowledge of Chinese art, politics and social history, and the post-Cultural Revolution art education system. Structuring his analysis around these moments mirrors the “intertemporality” of Liu's work and the juxtaposition of historical periods and narratives through her appropriated and layered images and objects. De Guzman, the exhibition curator, considers the meaning behind Liu's ongoing use of the photographic image, including its function as a subversive tool in the context of the future-focussed Chinese communist ideology. He also briefly discusses her formative experiences in the political, multicultural activism of 1980s San Francisco. Stephanie Hanor writes on Liu's installations – an often neglected yet important part of her output – in an essay appropriately called “Art Is Not Just a Thing.” In a more poetic piece, the short-story author Yiyun Li shares her own childhood in Beijing in the 1970s and ponders the visual versus literary capture of such memories.

It is an engaging series of essays; however, there was a missed opportunity to address some new and timely topics, considering the amount of literature extant on Liu's work, much of it focussed on her personal story. For example, her work is not examined within the context of contemporary Chinese art, even though there are shared concerns with history and the individual. Liu's chronology notes her long friendship with Ai Wei Wei, who is quoted on the back of the catalog, and other contemporary Chinese artists. There is also no discussion of the paintings from 2012, which show a marked shift in Liu's imagery and painting style, drawing from Chinese instructional graphic books for children. Perhaps as a result of focussing on her biography, and the number of essays, there is some repetitiveness. Certain artworks and moments in Liu's history are discussed by multiple authors.

Closing the catalog is an extensive chronology of the artist written by Liu's husband, art historian Jeff Kelley. Buried in the small type is family information, such as her father being imprisoned in the year of her birth and not being found until 1994, and revealing moments in her art practice. Interspersed with the text are self-portraits. One series from 2008 depicts Liu at different ages paired with drawings from that year. As Kelley says, Liu has a conversation with herself, encapsulating her lifelong explorations into memory, history, and time. It is a striking close to a catalog focussed on an extraordinary artist and the interconnectedness of her art and life.