As part of our work as Agency of Record for the Hung Liu Estate, alongside strategy partner Brent Foster Jones, we created a new brand and visual identity for the organization, which seeks to preserve and promote the legacy of the Chinese-born, American artist Hung Liu.
Hung Liu (1948–2021) was a seminal artist and beloved teacher at Mills College, who lived and worked in Oakland, CA. She was the first Asian-American woman to have a solo show at the National Portrait Gallery, curated by Dorothy Moss, now the Director of the Hung Liu Estate. Being born in a year of the rat was a proud part of her identity, and her studio contains assemblages of hundreds of icons, images and objects of the rodents that she collected over the years.
SCOPE
- Brand Identity
- Brand Guidelines
- Communications
- Creative Direction
- Social
- Website / UI / UX
PARTNERS
- Reputation: Brent Foster Jones
- Web Development: Smith Process
- Printer: Oscar Printing
The identity is based on a modular stack of typography, that slides and reconfigures into a suite of lockups. We took the typeface GT Flexa, with its pronounced ink traps and customized it with additional cuts to reference the linseed oil drips frequently found in Hung Liu’s work. In most applications, the system relies only on one color, red, which was both a favorite of the artist and serves as a link to her Chinese origins. A small drawing of a rat, hand-carved in wood by the artist, provides a wink of humor and reflects her lifelong affection for her Chinese zodiac sign.
The brand was developed through close collaboration with the estate. A comprehensive website of the artist’s art and archives for scholars, curators, teachers, students, and aficionados, including a dedicated content channel featuring fresh scholarship is currently in development.
