THE SECRET LIFE OF Lucy LIU
The actress is a successful artist of some very bold works
She’s never been short of acting gigs, with highprofile roles in Kill Bill and Charlie’s Angels and more recently, as wisecracking Joan Watson in TV show Elementary. But for almost three decades, Lucy Liu has been moonlighting as a successful artist – and one of her hidden talents is painting erotic lesbian art! Until 2011, the actress used her Chinese name, Yu Ling, for her art, which has been displayed in galleries in the US, Germany and the UK since 1993. But while she’s been open about her other major talent in recent years, her artistic work didn’t attract much attention until recently, when her fans discovered her collection of nude paintings.
“Like we need more reasons to love her,” one fan mused on Twitter.
Inspired by a centuries-old form of Japanese erotic art called shunga, Liu’s bold and provocative pieces are all the more surprising given her strict upbringing, which shunned sex and nudity. “I think that when you connect to art, it heightens your level of being a human being,” Liu told The Straits Times. “It gives you accessibility to something and makes you feel like you’re not alone.”
An artist before she was an actress, Liu began playing around with collage when she was 15. Since then, she’s experimented with all kinds of art forms, including drawing, painting and sculpture, which she studied at the New York Studio School from 2004 to 2006.
Earlier this year, Liu had her first museum show with fellow artist Shubigi Rao at the National Museum of Singapore. The actress had spent the previous six years collecting rubbish around the streets of New York and finding a new home for items in old handbound books
– a process which eventually became the series Lost and Found.
“I find it abhorrent to pollute and to waste things,” Liu says of the inspiration behind the project. “We grew up with very little money.”
But while she’s always been eager to share her creations with the world, it took years before she was brave enough to let the world know that Yu Ling was actually the actress who rose to fame in ’90s hit show Ally McBeal. “When you’re acting, you’re playing a character and you want people to see that person in the way you format them to be,” she told The Straits Times. “But when you show your work, it’s intimate and terrifying.”
Liu told The Hollywood Reporter that using a pseudonym was a ‘‘form of protection’’, but she also wanted “to allow the viewer to have a very clear and open mind when they came to see the works”.
And they clearly like what they see, with Liu’s art dealer, Daniel Chen, revealing that clients will usually pay anywhere between $US10,000 and $50,000 for one of her pieces.
So what’s next for Liu, A-list actress turned artist extraordinaire? With Elementary finishing in August, she’ll have more time to spend at her studio in Jersey City, where she moved her creative space to after her son Rockwell, 4, was born.
She can probably also get used to having more people than usual turn up to see her works. “Now, with the media and the internet, it’s impossible to really keep yourself anonymous,” Liu says. “You just have to tear off the band-aid.”