Lucy Liu's next victim ... the art world

Do you want to meet the artist?' The gallery owner leads me through the crowd of assorted art collectors, actors and random friends attending Lucy Liu's exhibition launch in a new townhouse gallery near Regent's Park called Salon Vert. Upstairs, there she is, ponytail of black hair flowing down her back, a flower print blooming across the chest of her Lanvin dress. She is standing in front of one of her canvases, describing it to the actor Dominic Cooper, who is nodding and stroking his beard. She is explaining how she slashed the canvas with a knife, and how she also hand-embroidered the outline of an anatomically perfect skeleton on to the same canvas. But which came first? The destructive slashing or the creative stitching? 'That's a good question,' says Lucy. 'I'm not going to tell you. But it holds: the two are in tension against each other.'

So Lucy is an artist now. It makes you want to sigh, jadedly: oh why do famous people consider their hobbies world-class? But then you see her complex, personal canvases - hand-stitched and stuck with funny little found objects, pieces of rubbish she has collected for years, orphaned pebbles and broken bits of butterfly wing - and you see that she has poured her heart and soul and years of her life into this art, and you can't be jaded about it any more.

Especially not when you consider how vulnerable a big star, more used to kicking ass for Tarantino, must feel making their private passion public. 'It's a really big ripping-the-Band-Aid-off moment for me,' says Lucy. She has been exhibiting in New York since 1993 under the pseudonym Yu Ling (her Chinese name in pinyin). Yu Ling's CV featured her art studies and her photography scholarship to Beijing University. It did not feature Ally McBeal. Or Charlie's Angels. Or Jackie Chan movies. 'I thought I would let people see the art without knowing I was that same person who they saw chopping people's heads off. Because that can taint a person, you know?'

Indeed. When I first met Lucy, the day before her gallery opening, she seemed, if not a potential head-chopper, then certainly tense: unsmiling, poised in all her movements like a ballet dancer and quick to interrogate anything I said about her art. 'Really? That's interesting you say that. I've never heard that before,' she said in an icy voice that made me quake in my boots. But as soon as she realised I was genuinely interested, she became warm, zany, and delightful, rooting around in her handbag to show me her latest objet trouvé, a tiny bit of broken computer she found on the pavement in London. 'I walked past it in the rain, and then I ran back and got it,' she says, proudly showing me a miniature AC adaptor with an Afro of multicoloured wires. 'It's got a personality. I picked it up and I said, "Come on, let's go home." '

Quirky and strong, with a quicksilver, analytical mind, she lays herself bare in her art. Seventy Two, her series of black and white ink splodges, is inspired partly by Chinese calligraphy and partly by encounters with the mystical Jewish sect Kabbalah. Does Kabbalah play a big part in her life? 'It's something that inspired me,' she says carefully. 'But there can be a lot of mistrust and fear and whispering about religions, or the unknown, something that people are not tuned into My attitude comes from curiosity, it's something I'm interested in, it's not a label you can tie on everything I do.'

Her art draws on many sources: Taoist philosophy, Japanese prayer flags, voodoo-style charms, or sculptures she saw on a UNICEF mission to the Congo ('Oh my God that was horrible it was stifling, all the violence and rape made it feel like you couldn't breathe. And it's gotten worse now'). But her most profound theme is the experience of being an outsider. 'A lot of the work is about the cultural background of growing up in a very Chinese family in New York. When I was growing up, people didn't really assume there was racism because we're white-skinned. If you're not African American, you're OK. But there was racism, because even when I was growing up there were no images of Asian people in film or television, and if there were, they were stereotypical.'

She is very much a first-generation New Yorker. 'We didn't have many traditions in our family. My parents [Tom and Cecilia, who gave up careers as a civil engineer and biochemist to move to the US] were immigrants coming from China, and they spoke English haltingly. They both held down full-time jobs, and we were latch-key children; you're given a key and you take yourself to school. There wasn't time for niceties. It was about survival. It wasn't about continuing traditions. It wasn't like, "Oh, it's so-and-so's birthday, let's get ten candles" ' She never celebrated her birthday? 'We didn't do birthdays. I wasn't the odd man out - neither did my sister or my brother. It was unfortunate.' She laughs, but her voice has become slightly emotional. 'And then you went to other people's houses, and they did things differently. Like waiting to sit down together before eating their food. That wasn't something we had, so the lack of tradition and pattern and structure made it very difficult for me, and maybe that's why I went into a business [acting] where you never know if you're going to jump on a plane and go somewhere else. That looseness is comfortable for me now, but everyone needs structure, and I think art gives me that structure.'

Her parents always emphasised education, and she studied at Stuyvesant High School in New York and graduated in Oriental studies from the University of Michigan before she dropped the bombshell. She has told it this way in the past: 'I went to my father and said, "I am going to California." "NO!" "OK, I am going to be an actress." "NO!" "I am going to work in movies." "NO!" "Television." "NO!" "Commercials." "MAYBE!" ' Her first acting role was as a waitress in Beverly Hills 90210, but a few years later the Ally McBeal scriptwriter David E Kelley created the role of evil, charismatic lawyer Ling Woo for her. She won many fans for her wonderful performance, as well as an Emmy nomination. Further career highs saw her completing the Charlie's Angels triumvirate alongside Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz, and starring as O-Ren Ishii, queen of the Tokyo underworld, in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Vol 1. Cashmere Mafia and Joey were TV flops enlivened by her presence. This year she appeared on stage on Broadway in the modern comedy of manners God of Carnage.

Whatever she's performing, she continues making art. 'For me there's no way to separate the two, it's not like one stops the moment you get on or off the set.' Her home in New York is a studio 'with a bed in the back'. Is it pristine, like her canvases? 'No, it's a hot mess!' She used to live with her brother John and his wife, occupying a floor of their home. John, immediately recognisable as her brother because he shares Lucy's perfect facial bone structure, told me how she would often work on her art through the night, after filming: 'That's when her inspiration flows.'

She is a great taker of classes: art, photography. 'I even took a needlepoint class. That's what I do.' The conventional samplers and 'Do Not Disturb' signs she sewed for friends eventually mutated into more disturbing embroidery of spinal columns. 'There's something really nice about doing something so methodical, it just empties your mind completely.' Stitching, to her, is also about how the body heals. 'It's about how once something has happened to you, it becomes part of you, whether you want it to or not. If you're abandoned as a child, that's in your body, like a switch that can be triggered later in life, even by a casual remark. There's a fragility to all of us. Sometimes a paper cut can hurt the most.'

She has had surgery on her lower back. 'I have had many injuries from different stunts over the years, and I realised how trauma that happens to our bodies stays with us, and it's emotional. You hold on to these things and grow through them. And then you go to the doctor and they say, "You've been injured ten years, but your body just worked around it." ' She is now showing me a squat, boxy, wood-textured sculpture she has cast in bronze that represents emotional damage. At least I think it does. 'This represents something that slips, something that changes, but does not disconnect.' Like a growth? 'No, not like a growth. It's about how you adjust. Maybe you've had a fall or you've had a bad break-up and you've broken your heart and it's the worst thing in the world, and then you adjust. You adjust because you have no choice.'