Ghosts : seventy portraits

Ghosts: Seventy Portraits presents a selection of paintings by the late Chinese-born artist Hung Liu, who used historical black and white photographs as a point of departure for her work. Her subjects range from Chinese to American, and include 19th-century historical figures, orphaned children, anonymous laborers, prostitutes, and refugees to her past self. Beyond making history and memory palpable in the present, Liu's summoned portraits unveil that we are all migrating, displaced people. In the artist's own words, "we are all from somewhere else. Therefore, we are all refugees of some sort, emigrants or immigrants, migrants or émigrés. We carry ourselves, our ancestors' ghosts, to wherever we have gone or are going, and we follow them back as far as their images will take us."