As a new year approaches and many hope for better times ahead, west coast painter Hung Liu marks time in a personal and captivating way in two new paintings at Nancy Hoffman Gallery. Every twelve years, at the start of the Chinese zodiac and in the Year of the Rat in which she was born, the artist creates a self-portrait paired with an important symbolic animal or object. In 2020, the most recent year of the rat, the artist marks her 72nd year with an image of herself draped in and masked by the US flag, a contrast to the red scarf she wears in her 1972 portrait as she lived through China’s Cultural Revolution. To the right, she repeats a five-stroke Chinese character to recall the prisoner’s act of marking time in strokes on the wall. (On view through Jan 2nd in Chelsea. Masks and social distancing are required.)
