Another work in question was a 2011 painting of 12 schoolgirls in uniforms wearing gas masks, which Ms. Liu said was originally based on a historical photograph of an air raid drill during World War II.

“The message is antiwar so I thought it was O.K., but when I talked with my Chinese artist friends about it, they just said one word: Hong Kong,” Ms. Liu said.

In recent months, images of gas masks — particularly as worn by students — have become widely associated with the antigovernment protests that have convulsed Hong Kong since June and angered the authorities in Beijing, who see the demonstrations as a direct challenge to their rule in the semiautonomous territory.

Ms. Liu said that after the authorities voiced objections, she reluctantly agreed to withdraw the nine works in question from the show. What remained was still a “pretty strong show,” she said, including a large-scale installation of 250,000 fortune cookies piled atop train tracks — a reference to the nuggets of gold that lured a wave of Chinese immigrants to America in the 19th century, many of whom later went on to build the country’s first Transcontinental Railroad.

The final show would also have included some of Ms. Liu’s more recent works, based on the Depression-era photographs of Dorothea Lange as well as some works that had been exhibited in China before, like a painting of a Chinese mother and daughter pulling a barge upstream.

But in a sign of the fast-shrinking space for expression in China, the authorities decided in the end to effectively kill the show altogether by refusing to issue the approvals required to import the remaining works.