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The ArtistA career guide · fact-checked July 2026
Long before she was O-Ren Ishii or Joan Watson, Lucy Liu was making art — and she has never stopped. Her second career, as a painter and mixed-media artist, is one of the most substantial of any working actor.
An artist first
Liu began experimenting with collage and photography around age fifteen, while at Stuyvesant High School in New York. She has kept a serious studio practice ever since, working across painting, collage, photography, silkscreen, ink drawing, and sculptural "handmade constructions" built from found and discarded objects. She studied painting at the New York Studio School in the mid-2000s, and describes her recurring subjects as "security, salvation, and the long-term effects of personal relationships on our physical and emotional selves."
The name Yu Ling
For years Liu exhibited under her Chinese name, Yu Ling, a deliberate choice so the work would be judged on its own merits rather than on her fame. She first showed under the name in 1993 and used it into the early 2010s before exhibiting under her own name. It is worth correcting a myth that circulates online: the pseudonym and the art career are entirely real, but the occasional claim that she is known chiefly for erotic work is false. The overwhelming majority of her output is abstract and personal.
Three decades of exhibitions
Liu's first solo show, Unraveling, opened at the Cast Iron Gallery in SoHo in 1993. Over the following decades she showed across the United States and abroad — New York, Los Angeles, Munich, Miami, London, Manchester, and Halifax — in shows including Glass Onion (2006), Passing China (Miami, 2010), Seventy Two (London, 2011), and Totem (Manchester, 2013).
A turning point came in 2019, when Unhomed Belongings opened at the National Museum of Singapore — her first-ever museum exhibition, shared with the artist Shubigi Rao. It centered on a practice she began around 2012: rescuing objects discarded on the street and sealing them inside hand-bound books. "The idea is to find a home for things that have been discarded," she explained. "Once they were placed in the books, they seem to have found a place."
"what was" and the turn toward family
In 2023, the New York Studio School mounted what was, a show of large acrylic paintings drawn from Liu's own family photographs, circling memory, motherhood, and her relationship with her mother. It set the template for the work that followed: images pulled from the family album, then layered and reworked so that emotional truth outweighs documentary accuracy.
"Hard Feelings" (2026)
Liu's most personal exhibition to date, Hard Feelings, ran at Alisan Fine Arts in New York from May 14 to June 6, 2026. It extended a body of work she began in 2017 after the death of her father, Tom Liu — paintings that start from family photographs and then obscure and reimagine them, exploring motherhood, immigration, cultural inheritance, and, as she has put it, "how love, duty and misunderstanding can exist simultaneously within a family." The show drew features from Forbes, Artnet, and Tatler.
In her own words
Liu has been candid about what the studio gives her that the screen cannot. "Visual art is where I can be completely autonomous," she told Forbes in 2026. Painting, she has said, "gives me a way to metabolise experience privately before stepping back into the intensity of production" — a way to "sit with memories and emotions that don't always have clear language or resolution." On her subject: "Memory isn't fixed — it evolves. You're not just documenting it, you're reinterpreting it."
Seventy Two
In 2011 Liu published Seventy Two (HENI), a book of seventy-two ink-and-acrylic paintings inspired by the 72 Names of God, with essays by Deepak Chopra and the art historian Ori Z. Soltes. It remains the fullest published record of her studio work, and a reminder that the art is not a hobby adjacent to the acting but a parallel life's work.