Lucy Liu: Hard Feelings at Alisan Fine Arts Brings a Decade of Memory to the Surface

The paintings in Hard Feelings — Lucy Liu’s solo exhibition at Alisan Fine Arts New York, on view through June 6 — do not illustrate grief so much as replicate its structure. They layer over their own foundations. Earlier marks surface through later ones. Figures emerge, get covered, partially reappear. The canvas is always in the process of becoming something other than what it was.

Lucy Liu has been making visual art since 1993 — before most people knew her name. The what was series, which anchors this show, began in 2017 following the death of her father. She returned to family photographs not to document them but to use them: as starting points for paintings that track how memory moves through time, accumulating pressure, losing definition, occasionally clarifying into something almost too direct to look at.

The what was Series and What Lucy Liu Hard Feelings Argues

Family Portrait (2016), the earliest work in the exhibition, comes closest to representation — five figures in a park, impasto faces, brushwork that collapses into gesture at the edges. It establishes the problem the series spends the next decade working through: how to paint what a photograph recorded without reproducing what it shows. The answer, in the subsequent canvases, is consistent refusal. Earlier layers get buried under looser, more expressive overpainting until the original image dissolves entirely.

The more recent work shifts. What Was and What Stays (both 2023) draw from photographs of Liu’s mother as a young woman after her immigration to the U.S. The figure is now outlined rather than obscured — anchored within the composition rather than swallowed by it. That formal change is the exhibition’s central argument. The Firelei Báez survey at Hauser & Wirth offers a useful point of comparison — another painter whose diasporic inheritance drives the formal vocabulary of the work, from an entirely different direction.

From Gesture to Restraint in Lucy Liu Hard Feelings

The two most recent paintings — 1965 and Hourglass (both 2026) — are the quietest in the exhibition and probably the most demanding. Both parents appear, outlined with a linearity that has more in common with drafting than painting. In 1965, their faces are covered by childlike drawings; her maternal grandparents’ faint outlines press through behind them. The generational layering is structural, not symbolic. It’s built into the surface.

Liu has described the act of revisiting these photographs as reinterpretation rather than recovery. “Memory isn’t fixed — it evolves.” The work earns that observation. These aren’t paintings about the past. They’re paintings about what happens to the past when you keep looking at it.

Lucy Liu Hard Feelings at Alisan Fine Arts: Visitor Information

Hard Feelings is on view at Alisan Fine Arts New York, 120 East 65th Street, through June 6, 2026. Tuesday through Saturday, 11am–6pm. The show closes soon — it’s worth the trip.

Images courtesy of Alisan Fine Arts.