Hung Liu, artist who documented the immigrant experience, has died at 73

Artist Hung Liu, whose striking portraits depicted life in Maoist China and the American immigrant experience, has died at age 73.Liu's death on Saturday followed a battle with pancreatic cancer, according to the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, where she was due to open a major exhibition later this month. 

The gallery's director, Kim Sajet, praised the late painter's "extraordinary artistic vision" in a statement, adding that Liu's work "was always rooted in history as she transformed marginalized subjects into monumental, heroic, contemporary figures." 

Liu's forthcoming exhibition, the first solo show by an Asian American at the National Portrait Gallery, will still go ahead, the museum confirmed. She was born in Changchun, a city in northeastern China, in 1948, the year before the Communist Party declared victory in the country's bloody civil war. Growing up in the early decades of Mao's rule, Liu trained in Socialist Realism -- an idealized style typical of communist art education and propaganda at the time -- before studying mural painting at Beijing's prestigious Central Academy of Fine Art.

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