Embodied Re-presentation – Hung Liu’s Intermedial Space of Photo-Painting

This talk by scholar Ina Choi explores how Hung Liu reconfigures historical photographs through painterly translation, disrupting visual conventions and reframing dominant narratives of the past.

Trained in both Socialist Realism in China and conceptual art in the U.S., Liu occupies a complex position between ideological systems and art historical traditions. Her work often draws on archival photographs, particularly of anonymous and historically marginalized women, laborers, and children, which she re-presents not as static documentation but as layered and unstable visual fields. Through techniques such as painting over photography and dripping, Liu creates unsettling pictorial surfaces that both disrupt and continue from historical connections. Straddling between representation and disruption, the image is not a record or reproduction of the past, but becomes a space through which the past can be reimagined.

This talk focuses on how Liu’s surfaces resist transparency and invite slowed, embodied engagement. Rather than offering fixed representations, her paintings ask what it means to see and to participate in the unfolding of an image. The intermediality of Liu’s photo-paintings such as Chinese Profile III demonstrates how her painterly strategies translate the surface into a spatial and temporal threshold that connects to historical reference while also emerging as a site of visual engagement, where tension is not resisted but embraced. In doing so, Liu reframes painting not as illustration, but as a mode of visual inquiry, attending to form, surface, and historical complexity through the unstable convergence of photography and paint.

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Ina Choi is a scholar whose research focuses on affect, intermedial aesthetics, and the politics of materiality in modern and contemporary Asian and Asian diasporic art. She recently received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages & Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania, where her dissertation, Ephemeral, Visceral: Feeling Through Form(less), examined the works of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Hung Liu through the lens of affect, embodiment, and nonlinear historical representation. Her work explores how form, surface, and media mediate emotional and political intensity, drawing from feminist, postcolonial, and diasporic frameworks. Ina has presented her research at the College Art Association, WCAAS and MCAA. She previously earned Masters degrees in Art History from UPenn and in Arts Administration from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently based in New York.

Image left: Hung Liu, Chinese Profile III, 1998. Oil on canvas. 80" x 80"

Image right: Ina Choi

Host or Publisher Arthur Ross Gallery, University of Pennsylvania