“When I was growing up, we didn’t talk about sex or the body,” says the actor and artist on the topic of her large-scale Shunga-inspired erotic paintings, some of which are now on display in a group show at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art
Lucy Liu is perhaps best known as an actor – as the cut-throat antagonist O-Ren Ishii, head of the Yakuza, opposite Uma Thurman in Tarantino’s cult classic Kill Bill: Volume 1, or the martial-arts-pro-cum-sleuthy-investigator Alex Munday in Charlie’s Angels alongside Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore, or for her cameo in the fourth season of Sex and the City, when Liu – as Liu – takes a Hermès-hungry Samantha Jones on as her PR agent, much to her eventual chagrin, or, more recently, as the unreachable philanthropic ex-wife to Bezos-esque billionaire Benji Barnes in the sequel to the The Devil Wears Prada. Lucy Liu, the artist – the painter, the photographer, the collager – however, is perhaps lesser known. This is the Lucy Liu I meet today.
“I started making art when I was very young,” says Liu, recalling the recent discovery of some of her collages “from like the 70s”. The Jackson Heights-born New York-based actor and artist later took a course in fine art and sculpture at the New York Studio School in the early Noughties. Today, her large-scale canvases are punctuated by thick, sweeping brushstrokes and vivid colour; figurative bodies intertwine in intimate poses inspired by traditional erotic Japanese Shunga.
Three of Liu’s paintings – En cachette; Je suis. Envois-moi; and Moi et les autres – are now on display at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in Melbourne, as part of a group show titled Are you lonely tonight? I’m so lonesome I could cry. Bringing together artists working in tapestry, painting, installation, photography and moving images, the exhibition asks how loneliness is experienced, mediated and resisted today. It’s the inaugural exhibition in the centre’s Art and Emotion series which over the next two years will continue to explore different emotional states that shape personal and collective living. Running until the end of August, the show considers loneliness as one of the defining emotional experiences of contemporary life, reflecting on digital dependency and doomscrolling, the Covid-19 pandemic, social distancing as well as intimacy, taboo and desire – the latter is Liu’s remit, at the heart of her contribution to the exhibition.
“When I was growing up, we [my family] didn’t talk about sex or the body,” Liu explains. “I didn’t know about the body, the menstrual cycle – no one explained those things to me. The human body was off limits. I was left in the dark. This was the way I grew up, and I’m sure it’s how other people did too.” The intention, she understands, was protective. The outcome was more complicated. “I think there’s a loneliness to that, to not knowing,” she continues. “When no one explains to you, you think things are wrong, and it stays with you as you grow up and bleeds into your life as an adult.”
, 2008)
Liu felt isolated in her innocence and naivety: “In being so sheltered by my parents, I felt like I had this veil of ignorance.” She was later drawn to the explicitness and openness of Shunga. “That dichotomy is what I wanted to look at, taking my own history as a child and shattering it with these large-scale paintings. While I can’t go back in time, it’s like recreating my own ability to know.” Painting became the outlet for this exploration. On frameless canvases attached directly to the wall, she “explodes” the style to address how quotidian nudity and sex are – and how important it is to openly converse on such subjects.
“I want to create a feeling, not of rebellion exactly … ” she pauses to think, before continuing: “but to make it very clear that this is something that has been going on forever. The cultural practices of the body and nudity and sex are not something that we talk about. It isn’t something that is presentable, and yet it’s very much nature and chemistry – it’s the reason we are.”
The spectrum through which Liu views loneliness is broad. “Loneliness isn’t just something that’s experienced when you’re alone – it’s something that people can feel in their own families, in their relationships, with other people.” And, in spite of its connotations, she recognises it for its benefits too. “It’s something that can help you discover and unearth things you perhaps don’t want to or are afraid of,” she says. “It can force you to confront uncomfortable sensations. It’s not just sad or scary but something that can be celebrated and cherished.”
, 2008)
“But,” she continues, “loneliness is a very different feeling to what it was 20 or 30 years ago. Technology has given loneliness new meaning.” She remembers film sets before social media and smartphones became ubiquitous. “People would be talking to each other. Now I look around and everyone is just on their phones and devices. It’s the same on the subway. Even in restaurants. People are eating at the same table, but they’re not talking to each other. It’s quite striking to see.” The cult of solitude. It’s endemic. “It really is.”
So what is the remedy? “I don’t know,” Liu sighs, despairingly. “I think it’ll have to be some sort of discovery on an individual level before there’s a collective one.” She reflects on the Covid-19 pandemic, which can now feel strangely distant, even as its effects persist. Social distancing only emphasised isolation. We feared one another. “Because somebody could carry it, bring it to you. We were afraid of our own groceries. Headlines were – and they still are – so fear-driven, and we have access to them all the time through our devices.”
Which is where Liu thinks art comes in, with its capacity to tap into something innately human and deeply emotional with an efficacy far more potent than statistics and data. “Art can convey and express both individual and collective experiences in a way that’s almost beyond the conscious.” Or conversational. Art reflects and shapes how we understand the world. It gives form to what we can’t say aloud.
, 2008)
Which can be said of acting too. “Both acting and painting spark creative energy,” she says. The difference for Liu is a matter of intro and extroversion, intro and extrospection. “Working with a crew of 200 people is very different from working in your studio alone. That juxtaposition can be tough to adjust to. I love working with a team of people, I think there’s so much to gain and learn and explore and enjoy when you’re with others.”
She’s just wrapped filming a new series, Superfakes, in which she plays a small-time Chinatown luxury counterfeit dealer who enters a dangerous black market underworld in a bid to support her family. Now, she’s back in the studio painting. In 2028, she’ll return to ACCA for a solo show, in which she’ll continue to explore relationships and intergenerational conversation. “I’ve learnt through isolation that the isolation I once wanted is perhaps further away than I initially thought – I don’t want to be isolated. But the balance of being in the studio alone, then also working in tandem and connecting with people on a set, is desirable. I always want that.”
Are you lonely tonight? I’m so lonesome I could cry is on display at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in Melbourne until 30 August.
