The weeping veil: painter Hung Liu excavates the surface of history.(PROFILE)

MIDWAY THROUGH OUR INTERVIEW for this article, two beefy firefighters, on a routine inspection of commercially zoned sites in the neighborhood, knock on the door of Hung Liu's Oakland studio.

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"But this is not a commercial site!" Liu cries. "It's just me and all my paintings!" After the confusion is sorted out, she invites the firemen into the studio. "Come in, come see my paintings! They're quite beautiful!"

The firemen enter shyly. Soon they are full of awe.

This is an understandable reaction to Liu's work. The canvases are large, each running 6 to 10 feet long, and the faces they depict are almost unbearably vivid in the sunlit studio.

Liu, an Arts professor at Mills College in Oakland, California, who immigrated to the United States from China in 1984, often works from archival photographs of Chinese peasants and young prostitutes. Her main interest is the human figure, painted with the realistic technique of a trained muralist. She is also heavily interested in symbolism, and the figures in her paintings are often surrounded by lively foxes, butterflies and cranes. She has said that her secret collaborator is gravity. She dilutes her paints with linseed oil, and the colors weep down, as if the men and women in her paintings lived such sorrowful lives that their souls resist any more containment.

Her new series of paintings is based on stills from Daughters of China, a 1949 film produced by the Chinese government to commemorate the heroism of eight female soldiers who fought a flank of Japanese soldiers during the occupation of Northeast China in 1938.