She was predominantly a painter, but also worked with mixed-media and site-specific installation and was also one of the first artists from China to establish a career in the United States.

[5] Although the use of cameras to aid painting was prohibited, Liu rebelled by secretly taking photographs of local farmers in Huairou with their families and making drawings of them.

[5] Her paintings and prints typically featured layered brushstrokes combined with washes of linseed oil which gave images a drippy appearance.

"[7] Given the pathos that often infuses her works, her painting style has been described by Liu's partner, critic and curator Jeff Kelley, as a kind of "weeping realism.

"[10] Many works were drawn from the artist's personal collection of 19th century Chinese photographs, a large portion of which feature prostitutes.

"[6] As curator Réne de Guzman writes, her paintings bring details of Chinese history and memory into the present for American viewer.

"[12][13] Since the late 1990s, Liu has occasionally taken historical photographs of non-Chinese women, refugees, migrants, workers, and children as a point of departure.

Her Strange Fruit paintings of the early to mid 2000s depicted Korean "comfort women" forced to serve as prostitutes for Japanese soldiers in the second World War.

As resident artist at Capp Street Project in San Francisco in 1988, Liu painted a series of works whose main focus was the issue of identity as it relates to immigrant status.

This was Liu's first self-portrait,[23] in which the artist painted an enlarged version of her own green card with several pointed changes, e.g. her birthdate of 1948 becoming 1984, the date of her immigration, and her name comically replaced by the words "Fortune Cookie.

[23][25] Dong Isbister proposes that Resident Alien is best understood via a 'diasporic consciousness,' as Liu asks her audience to "examine how her body is positioned and portrayed in relation to legal, racial, and gender issues based on immigration."

The painting evidences the "tension between an ethnic, a national and a transnational identity";[26] at the same time, Liu "shows resistance to being assimilated into the stereotypes imposed upon her by inserting her own voice.

In this work, Liu created a "gold mountain" made of 200,000 fortune cookies, engulfing a crossroads of railroad tracks.

The junction of the tracks references the cultural intersection of East and West, as well as the Chinese immigrants who perished during the building of the Sierra Nevada stage of the transcontinental railroad.

[29] Jiu Jin Shan (Old Gold Mountain) was also installed at the Mills College Art Museum in 2013 as part of the exhibition Hung Liu: Offerings.

[31] The installation depicts 80 cranes that are meant to comfort and give blessings to people who are leaving their homes or returning from travel.

[36] Réne de Guzman, the chief curator at the Oakland Museum of California, organized the exhibit in collaboration with Hung Liu.