UC Irvine

The cases of Hung Liu (1948 – 2020) and Martin Wong (1946 – 1999) emerge as uniquely peripheral in the context of Chinese American art as the two oil painters, similar in age but vastly disparate in their styles and subject matter, both find themselves and their art deeply misunderstood by the limitations of their assigned identities as Chinese American artists. Do these artists not engage with Chineseness or do they engage in a way that does not suit the Western imagination? What about these artists has enabled them to resist the reframing of their identities and consequently relegated them to the sidelines? In this paper, the category of “Chinese American artist” is to be questioned by examining and challenging the assigned identities of these two artists’ self definitions of their own Chineseness as depicted in their own artworks. Through an analysis of both artist’s personal backgrounds, collections of Chinese objects, and visual analysis of paintings that feature Chinese and Chinese American subjects, alternative narratives of the Chinese American experience are revealed.