Lucy Liu’s Parallel Art Practice and Other Reads This Week
By Wim Langedijk for HURS
Lucy Liu’s Parallel Art Practice and Other Reads This Week
HUR Reads is our definitive shortlist of the most prominent articles from around the web.
By HURS Team
1
Mariana Chkonia
Mariana Chkonia found her artistic calling at 50, transforming centuries-old Tushetian feltmaking into striking contemporary works that blend tradition with experimentation. In conversation with Apartamento, she reflects on family, war, reinvention, and the persistence that led her from interior design and cooking to art. Rooted in Georgia’s landscapes and heritage, her practice is both a personal meditation and a subtle act of cultural preservation in a rapidly changing world.
APARTAMENTO
After retiring from American Ballet Theater, Misty Copeland is shaping ballet’s future as curator of the Joyce Theater’s annual Ballet Festival. Bringing together established and emerging artists across generations and disciplines, she champions broader representation, access, and opportunity while embracing ballet’s evolving possibilities. For Copeland, the festival, and her work beyond the stage, is less about legacy than creating space for the next generation to redefine what ballet can be.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Lucy Liu reflects on her parallel career as a visual artist, revealing how her large-scale, Shunga-inspired paintings emerged from a childhood where sex and the body were rarely discussed. Speaking alongside a new Melbourne exhibition, she explores loneliness as both isolation and self-discovery, while arguing that art can express emotional truths beyond words. For Liu, painting has become a deeply personal way to reclaim conversation and intimacy.
ANOTHER MAGAZINE
As Sarah Kane’s Cleansed returns to the stage, critics and directors argue her work has long been misunderstood as “impossible” to perform. Beneath its notorious violence lies a radical reimagining of theatrical form, using shocking imagery to explore love, grief, and human endurance. Nearly three decades on, Kane’s plays feel newly relevant, with their emotional ambiguity and refusal to offer easy answers continuing to reshape contemporary theatre.
A RABBIT’S FOOT
A decade after its publication in The Paris Review, Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story “Bettering Myself” has become the focus of a wrongful termination lawsuit in Florida. A college professor alleges she was suspended without pay after assigning the story in a class on unreliable narrators, with administrators deeming it “morally objectionable.” The case has reignited debate over academic freedom, censorship, and the role of provocative literature in the classroom.