Installation view of Lucy Liu: Hard Feelings at Alisan Fine Arts, NYC

Lucy Liu: Hard Feelings
Closing Saturday, June 6, 2026
120 East 65th Street, NYC

Don’t miss your opportunity to experience Hard Feelings, a solo exhibition of paintings by Lucy Liu before it closes on June 6 at Alisan Fine Arts.  Centered on works from her ongoing what was series, the exhibition explores the emotional and psychological terrain of memory, with particular attention to family, cultural inheritance, and the shifting nature of personal history.

Liu’s Hard Feelings series began in 2017 following the death of her father, an event that prompted her to revisit family photographs and reflect on the complexities of memory, loss, and childhood. Using these archival images as source material, she transforms personal histories into layered paintings that explore the shifting relationship between remembrance and imagination.

While early works remain more closely tied to representation, later paintings increasingly obscure their photographic origins through expressive brushwork, overlapping imagery, and accumulations of paint. Figures emerge, dissolve, and reappear, mirroring the instability of memory itself. More recent works return to family photographs with greater clarity, particularly images of her parents before and after immigration to the United States. These paintings retain recognizable figures while exploring themes of absence, inheritance, and generational experience.

Across the exhibition, Liu examines how memories are continuously reconstructed rather than faithfully preserved. The paintings balance visibility and erasure, intimacy and distance, revealing the emotional complexity of family history. Rather than offering resolution, Hard Feelings traces the enduring presence of the past and the ways in which feelings of attachment, grief, forgiveness, and compassion remain layered within personal memory.

To learn more, click here.