A single glance at any front page can alert you to what's bedevilling the world today: Identity-based conflict. Whether it's Bosnians and Serbs in the former Yugoslavia, Palestinians and Jews in Israel, or lesbians and gay men in the American military, contemporary societies are rent by splits of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and religion. Being accidents of birth, such divisions are usually insurmountable. (It's the rare individual, after all, who rises above the intractability of religion or gender.) Against this background of re-emergent tribalism, Hung Liu paints. In her art, she probes the fluidity and nuanced multiplicity of identity, rather than the chauvinism that is its crude and ubiquitous caricature. As a Chinese-born, American, feminist, divorcee, professor, immigrant, artist, person of color, mother, wife, and daughter, it's a subject she knows all too well.

Liu's newest work offers several revealing changes of direction and emphasis. Much of it, for instance, disguises its origins in commercial photography and media. Although Liu has, since 1988, worked almost exclusively from historical photographs, now she's extended this practice to contemporary pictures: Recents snapshots are the basis of portraits of her mother and herself. She's also producing fewer works in flamboyantly mixed-media formats. For this show, carved architectural fragments have been subtly collaged onto Daughter In Law and Miss Y, and a a marble apple punctuates the washy veils of Apple Shrine's paint to evoke the sexual dynamics of the Garden of Eden. Like all of the applied objects, the apple theatrically breaks the illusionism of the painted surface and forces us to focus, if only unconsciously, on the disruptive element. Liu has cut back on what she calls these "accoutrements and props" in order to maintain viewer focus. "I want more compression," she says.

She's achieved that and more. Whether Liu's modified methods come to be viewed as a departure from--or a refinement of--her past practices, this seems to be a transitional exhibition: It is more personal and less psychologically distanced than any I've seen, and certainly than any that's been shown in New York. As always, Liu's works play off one another, functioning more as an ensemble than an installation. Each of the family portraits and faceless groups, for example, probe the relationship of individual and larger social units. "In China it's hard to define one's individuality," Liu says. If the self-obsessed West has given her plenty to brush up against in staking out her own individuality, her more complex views of social organization and relations should prove equally eye-opening to Westerners.

Liu calls her new images of herself a "second wave" of self portraits. The first wave, of the late eighties, represents modified versions of the artist's green card and passport photos, respectively titled Resident Alien and Trauma. Liu titles her latest self portrait Burial at Little Golden Village: It is a bust-length views of the artist before a corn field that evokes (she says) ancestral lands, her grandparents' graves, and her own exile from Beijing to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. The paint (and especially its title) deflects attention from Liu, the individual, to her social role as the reverent and attentive granddaughter.

The left half of Burial sets Liu's head in silhouette against the more convetionally shaped depiction of the corn field. Every canvas in this show is "shaped"--that is, non-rectangular--except for New Arrivals, which has five rectangular holes punched in it. Liu has previously used canvases that are "arched" to mimic the format of the early-20th century photographs she utilizes, and many here derive their irregular shapes from other sources or subjects. The sometimes hallucinatory effect of the shaped cut-outs is like a cinematic close-up that obliterates contextualizing details. For Liu, trained in the academic/social realist traditions of Western illusionism, such formats have metaphorical meaning as well. "Breaking the boundaries frees me and my subjects," she comments. "Even rectangular canvases look irregular to me now.

In Ma, a portait of Liu's mother, the artist's gradmother also plays an unseen role. Liu's mother is represented in a head-to-wrist-length view set against a hilly vista outside Beijing that she had visited as a tourist. The contrast between this image without hands and a recent painting (Grandma, not in this show) of her grandmother prominently holding her hands at her sides is striking. After I call attention to it, Liu explains to me that as a child she was riveted by the demanding physical labor her grandmother performed, which was no longer required of young women like her mother. The snapshot-derived cropping of the composition renders the painting slightly surreal--a casual remembrance of what initially seems to be a woman buried up to her navel in cement.

Daughter-In-Law--a title that sounds like a family portrait--is actually a larger-than-life comment on power relations within the Chinese family. The daughter-in-law is traditionally located at the bottom of the familial pecking order, serving her in-laws, her husband and even her sons. If she doesn't, Liu observes, she's sent home to her parents as "returned goods." Miss Y, an image of a young woman examining herself in a mirror, is similarly freighted with cultural/historical meaning. Based on a magazine photo from the interwar years of the twenties and thirties, Miss Y isn't contemplating the existential verities of her life so much as her newly fashionable Western hairdo and Swiss watch. Liu is fascinated to have recently discovered that pre-Communist China was far more Western than she'd known; the majority of works in this show are in fact based on such mass-media imagery.

Group subjects predominate: girls' sports teams huddle in a circle or sprawl on a basketball court; five nurses bear newborns; three workers of indeterminate visage and gender lay out rice paper to dry. Sometimes faceless, they all wear uniforms that render them anonymous. But for Liu the distinction between group and individual is not simply a matter of numbers. "The prostitutes I depicted [as individuals] were also anonymous," she comments. "They had made-up names and they were labelled as a group, item by item, in a catalog." It seems totally unnecessary to suggest to someone reared in China that the personal is political. Nor do these group images suggest that Liu--a product of communally-oriented China--yearns for greater "unit cohesion" to invoke the not-so-ironical title of one of her paintings.

While discussing Blue Boy--three serial images of a young male actor from the Beijing Opera making up as a woman--Liu points out the similar subject of the film, Farewell My Concubine. I ask her how she feels about the current renaissance of Chinese art and film. She gently dismisses much of the art as "pseudo-Chinese, exoticizing, or Westernizing" and is characteristically private about identifying the feelings the recent films evoke. She does, however, strongly identify with such fifth generation filmmakers as Chen Kaige, who directed Farewell and Red Sorghum, and Zhang Yimou, the creator of Raise the Red Lantern and The Story of Qui Ju. Like Liu, these now forty-something directors couldn't attend college until after the Cultural Revolution. "We seem to share the need to recover something of our cultural past," she notes. "From the period beginning in the late-or even mid-19th century when the Chinese government couldn't close the door on the West. All that information was swept away in 1949."

Cultural identity inevitably compels such a recovery of the past, but it may also yield overdetermined responses to an artist's work. Many interpreters assume, perhaps unconsciously, that everything in an artist's work stems from the single facet of identity to which s/he's been reduced. Liu pinpointed this concern in her Resident Alien self portrait, which bears the name "Cookie, Fortune." (She also unwittingly exacerbates it by speaking so compellingly to writers about her life and its relationship to her work that some lazily produce bio-drama instead of interpretation.) Her work, however, brilliantly explores the opposite--the multi-faceted, constantly shifting nature of contemporary identity.

Every artist I know wants to think of herself as a Latina- or Lesbian- or Jewish artist on some days (and in some settings), and simply as an artist on others. Hung Liu is no exception. "Aren't you tired of being a Chinese artist?" I asked her. "Yes," she laughs. "And sometimes I'm tired of being a Chinese artist and a feminist artist."