Annalisa Liu
The instability of truth and authorship, in moments where a person becomes defined by the gaze of others.
Annalisa Liu is a New York–based artist and graduate of the Fine Arts program at Parsons School of Design. Her practice explores the instability of truth, authorship, and perception in moments where identity becomes shaped through the gaze of others.
Working primarily in oil painting, Liu creates psychologically charged spaces in which figures appear restrained, obscured, or in states of dissolution. Her work investigates the tension between inner experience and outward interpretation, questioning how vulnerability, silence, and suffering are often misread through projection and collective judgment.
Through recurring motifs such as bindings, engulfing forms, and fragmented bodies, Liu examines how meaning can become detached from lived reality and reconstructed by external narratives. Rather than presenting singular answers, her paintings inhabit spaces of ambiguity—between what is felt and what is believed, between what is visible and what remains hidden.
My current work explores the instability of truth and authorship in moments where a person becomes defined by the gaze of others.
I am interested in how the figure of the “victim” is often stripped of the right to narrate their own story. Instead, meaning is constructed externally—through speculation, projection, and a collective logic that quickly solidifies into something that feels unquestionable.
These paintings focus on the tension between inner experience and outward interpretation. The figures are often restrained, obscured, or in the process of dissolving, suggesting both vulnerability and resistance. Hands, bindings, and engulfing forms appear as forces that interrupt or overwrite the subject’s agency. What is seen is never fully stable—neither entirely imposed, nor entirely self-defined.
At times, this instability extends to how pain itself is received. Experiences of suffocation, restraint, or vulnerability may be misread as something visually compelling or even pleasurable. This is not an intention of the work, but a distortion produced through the viewer’s gaze.
In some works, I extend this tension beyond the front surface of the canvas. Subtle details and marks are placed along the sides of the painting—elements that are not immediately visible from a frontal view. They require the viewer to shift position, to move around the work. Only then might fragments of emotion or meaning begin to surface, suggesting that understanding is always partial, contingent, and dependent on perspective.
I am not trying to present a singular truth. Rather, I am drawn to the space of uncertainty: the hesitation between what is felt and what is believed, between what is real and what is constructed. When explanation loses its meaning, what remains? Does the act of speaking still matter if the outcome has already been decided?
Through this work, I question whether the right to tell one’s story can ever truly belong to oneself, or if it inevitably slips into the hands of others. There is also a quieter, more uneasy question underneath: if I let go and allow others to define what they see, does that become a form of release—or a form of destruction?