20191105 Sandra Liu Interview

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. From 2019 to 2020, Sandra was a studio artist at Root Division, a non-profit art gallery and artist space in San Francisco, CA. Sandra is currently working in the Bay Area, CA.

Kacy (K): Can you start off the interview by telling me a little bit about you and your practice?

Sandra (S): I am Sandra Liu. I’m primarily an oil painter, but I have a minor in stop motion animation. A lot of my work is influenced by cinema, and this is how I see the intersection between animation and painting. They’re both very narratively driven. I was very interested in writing and stories, and it just carries through with my painting.

K: When did you decide that you want to make a change?

S: When I was in high school, I was studying biology. I thought I was going to do premed. But I really didn’t like it very much. I was just kind of doing it because my parents, they’re both in science fields and it was something that they’re very familiar with. I always wanted to do animation, but didn’t really have any skills or experience. So when I went to college, I chose a program that allowed me to do both a computer science and art dual degree.

K: Which school is that? Is that Carnegie Mellon?

S: Yeah, so I thought I was going to do that because I like animation. Animation is art but also some computer skills. I took AP Computer Science in high school, so it wasn’t like I didn’t know anything. But then I ended up dropping computer science because I hated it. And then I transferred to art school after I did art only for that I went to art school afterwards.

"I remember that one of the things that drew me to art was I really needed to heal myself. And the problem with science was that you’re always lying. Like you can be not okay when you’re attending a lecture. There’s like a separation between the way that your personal life is and the way that your career or your professional life is. It’s like, regardless of how you perform on tests, you can be a great test taker, you’re the top in your class, but I wasn’t doing okay as a person. But those things were never addressed. And it was only art that I could address those issues."

K: Can you tell me a bit more about why you like animation so much?

S: Yeah. It has a lot to do with my childhood. I grew up watching a lot of TV. Honestly, it’s not even a joke. I think by the time I was a first grade, I had glasses, because my eyesight was so fucked up. Every single day I watched so much TV, that by the time I was in first grade, I needed glasses because I couldn’t see anything. My biggest hobby as a child is watching Disney movies and a lot of cartoons with my brother. That was like my childhood and that it just really made me love animation.

And then things have changed a lot when I was in high school, I was very depressed. Because I knew that I didn’t want to do science, yet I didn’t have the courage to say that I didn’t want to do science, nor did I have the courage to pursue art. And animation, in a way was like an escape. For me, you could make up your own stories, and you had your own projects in your head that you were working on, and it helped you get away from whatever it was that you are actually doing in your real life.

K: Do you remember how is your parents influence you, like do they beat you up if you don’t get good grades?

S: When I was growing up? Yeah, there was a lot of pressure to like to be a top performer. I think my parents always have that expectation that you’re going to be extremely academically successful and then find a job that’s extremely economically successful. My dad had anger issues when I was growing up, and he would lash out. Sometimes it’s not usually about getting bad grades. It’s like an A-minus, not like a C. It was really strict. And I took that attitude and put it into myself very young. I was a very high achiever.

K: What makes you made up your mind to switch to art? S: So I had a moment when I was in my second semester at Carnegie Mellon. I told you originally, during the first year, I was doing a dual degree in computer science and art. For the first year, I only did computer science, and it was a hot mess. I was extremely depressed, and I had lots of mental and health problems. I realized that I needed to take a break from computer science.

I had to make that call back to my father, I was dreading and getting prepared to be yelled at. I remember that moment, like the clearest one of the proudest moments of my life. Also, it was sad and I was crying. I’m really upset and I know that he will be upset, too. I’m upset with myself for having to do this. But I told him that I’m going to do art, and I know you’re not gonna be happy with it. But this is the first decision that I need to make for myself.

And then he said, I’m really proud of you.

And that moment is so important to me because I realized that I could have switched a lot earlier. It was like I had this dialogue in my head that it wasn’t okay. And when I finally told my dad about it, he was actually okay with it. The person who was holding me back from doing what I wanted was not him. That was me. For a long time, I was always blaming my parents, saying that they want this for me. At the end of the day, they support me, even if they don’t understand what I do or sometimes don’t feel very comfortable.

K: That is touching. This also reminds me a lot about my own practice, epically the part related to the idea “you are the person holding yourself back.” I see this idea appear in my different body of work a lot. Can you tell me more about what does art-making mean to you?

S: To me, art was even more difficult than computer science because there’s a lot of self-reflection—a lot of dealing with your mood, your anxieties. You can’t escape yourself when you are in the studio. I had problems with work. I had problems with anxiety and problem making decisions. Sometimes I want to throw things away or start over 20 million times, even though it’s due tomorrow.

I remember that one of the things that drew me to art was I really needed to heal myself. And the problem with science was that you’re always lying. Like you can be not okay when you’re attending a lecture. There’s like a separation between the way that your personal life is and the way that your career or your professional life is. It’s like, regardless of how you perform on tests, you can be a great test taker, you’re the top in your class, you get all the concepts, but I wasn’t doing okay as a person. But those things were never addressed. And it was only art that I could address those issues.

I think my art is always at the core of it is to catch that emotion, to catch this bodily sensation and to recreate it artificially. Because you cannot recreate a sensation that you’re being watched at night, this extremely strong feeling to recreate artificially is very difficult. But the heart of my practice is to try to recreate some of these intense moments or intense psychological violence and then to have other people share in that intensity of emotion. Even without having experienced it, they can still grasp the root of emotion.

I think another part of it is that I am very interested in critical theory, political theory, social theory, philosophy, social psychology. But all these things like ideas is where movies crossover. But all those things are like, “anti body”. Ideas are so anti body. Because when I was doing science, what I didn’t like about it was like, it’s all about trying to prolong your physical life. What can we do to make people healthier? What can we do to make you live longer? All those things are about now, but I’ve never really been interested in my current physical existence.

A lot of times, people ask me, what are you gonna do five years from now? I don’t know. I can tell you what I want to do maybe in a few weeks, maybe up to a year. That’s it. I really never think about my 30s or 40s. I just don’t I tell them that I’m not even sure whether we’re going to be alive. Because literally in two weeks, I could be dead so do I want to be miserable and do something else when I could be dead. These ideas are so interesting to me because they’re much bigger than myself. I know my art is not that important. But try to make an understanding of the social fabric or to understand the reasons why suffering exists in the world or dealing with female issues, female trauma, those are all things much bigger than myself.

K: This world, to me, is categorized into two parts – the material part and the spiritual part. I think I am also that type of person interested in the spiritual world more than the material world. I also remember one of my classmates asked why I left biotech, and I told him that I believe how we live matters way more than how long we live.

S: I don’t know if it’s spiritual, but it’s the invisible and soft part. If you’re thinking about human being, that is made up by two parts. One is the physical form of flesh or bone, and the other part is your mind. I’ve always been super interested in that mind because I think as an animator, it’s all about ideas. Art is really about ideas. And ideas are not bounded by time. Once they’ve existed, I’ve existed, and they’ll continue to exist after I’m dead.

You’re just a small blip in a larger picture. Your life has been influenced by factors that come before you, the things that you’re experiencing now, and will influence things that happen after you. And yet there are things that are universal in those psyches, the experience of suffering, experiencing pain, anxiety, these things that have existed since humans have existed and will continue to exist.

I think they erase away differences between people. There’s some kind of extreme connection in those very strong emotions and experiences that transcend gender, space, and time. That’s why science is so lame, because, like, Oh, we want to eliminate cancer. Great, but like, eliminating cancer doesn’t solve systemic issues about racism and sexism.

K: I think it’s almost done. Do you have anything you want to add more directly related to the ways in which the capitalist system affects your art journey?

S: I think it’s, especially for artists. Artists have such an interesting relationship with money. More so than other fields. I think this is because, on the one hand, when you are bartering, you’re very free. But when you work at a nonprofit organization, all anyone ever talks about is money and the lack of it. There’s a real reality of trying to run an art space in which everything is controlled by money, and the people that you’re trying to bring to the events or to the shows it influences what shows you put on it, influences whose work you promote.

My recent experience with it is that it’s very hard for me to price or to sell my work because there’s a huge component of it that is non-monetary. To give certain people a salary and put a label on this person with a certain price doesn’t make much sense as an artist. The value of your work is really not capital. The micro value is an emotional one and not a fiscal one. I’ve had people ask me to purchase pieces, and I don’t even know what to say.

K: Sometimes, I kind of feel I treat art-making or art as a religion. Like there is a superhuman controlling power bigger than me, and I can’t not be submissive in front of it. I understand what you mean when you say, “put a label on art with a certain price doesn’t make much sense”.

This also reminds me that, at a period of time, I felt really lost. I feel like every system doesn’t do any wrong. Capitalism does nothing wrong. It is just a kind of political system. The idea came out for a good reason. And it’s human nature that we have to blame. It’s human beings trying to find the loophole in all these systems in every possible way to make the world worse, not better.

S: I’ve been rereading one of my old books that I bought, which is called The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson. The book is examining instances of violence that exist in art. It’s about in what way can using violence in art or depicting violence or suggesting violence can be helpful. It can be healing, moral, art, or social framework. And then at which point, do these become exploitative, or brutalist. All these different approaches at the intersection between life, violence and art.

They had a really funny quote, and there it is similar to what you said, which is like philosophers from the beginning of time, have been interested in violence and cruelty as in relation to human nature. Some people have said like humans are good, let’s not be violent. Thomas Hobbes said humans are evil. Let us not be good. And then someone’s No, I think it’s like humans are evil. So there’s Christian, and then there’s Thomas Hobbes, and then there’s Freud, or nature, and each other, right? Humans are fundamentally evil, and the expression of art is to express that evil.

Santiago Sierra did a controversial performance piece. He had a gallery show, and he just hired illegal immigrants to sit underneath a cardboard box for the entire time of the show. So like, you can watch and see the boxes, but you can’t see the immigrants, but yet they’re being paid to sit silently under boxes for your viewership. How little can I pay these people just to harm their body? What point is that meaningful? At what point is that just exploitative? And then what is the role of art?

Sandra

website | https://sandra-liu.com/

Instagram | @sandora_liu

The interview with Sandra is part of an ongoing photo-sculputure project "21 Grams, the Weight of Souls - Grocery Bag". Her headshot is converted into a soft sculpture to capture the external and internal struggle of who were battling between having a remunerative career and pursuing their dreams.

21 Grams, the Weight of Souls - Grocery Bag #8 Printable fabric and resin 21'' (H) x 12'' (W) x 6'' (D) 2021