Sandra Liu was born in San Diego, California in 1996. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting with a Concentration in animation from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2018. Sandra has exhibited in Baltimore, Washington D.C., New York, San Francisco, and Chicago including shows at Cardinal Space in Baltimore, MD and Willow Street Gallery in Washington D.C. She was a 2018 XL Catlin Art Prize selected artist, and her work traveled nationally from the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco, CA to Linda Warren Projects in Chicago, IL, to the New York Academy of Art in New York, NY. In 2017, she attended a residency at Salem Art Works in Salem, NY. Sandra works both as a visual artist and freelance art reviewer.
Liu’s work uses both humor and horror to craft narratives around the historically difficult subject of the female body. Her paintings provide contemporary expressions of both female fear and female power in everyday experiences. Though sometimes unnerving in their bluntness, her images are extremely introspective, using the female figure as a stand-in for her own tendencies to question, play, cry, rage, and worry. As both a painter and stop-motion puppet maker, Liu is frequently inspired by cinema. Her work references the “gaze” of the camera to investigate notions of voyeurism, power, and intimacy. By positioning her figures in disembodied compositions, Liu catches the viewer in the act of looking. She challenges the power dynamics associated with the look, constantly weaving together ideas of safety, hierarchy, and visibility and the troublesome depiction of the female form. Her paintings re-examine the female body in a contemporary setting, creating images that are emotional, unnerving, or introspective.