Sandra Low is a Los Angeles-based artist. She received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Southern California and completed her Bachelor’s degree double majoring in art and sociology at UC Berkeley. She has shown widely across Southern California, including exhibitions at Art Salon Chinatown, Los Angeles International Airport, Walter Maciel Gallery, the Chinese American Museum, and a public commission from L.A. Metro. She teaches drawing and painting at Rio Hondo College.
Low spent much of her childhood being mesmerized by the television screen while shoveling rice into her mouth. Low’s drawings and paintings playfully skewer culture and her own life, constructing internal landscapes both heartfelt and bleak. Through collage and oddball narratives, her art roots around issues of consumerism, family, and the cross-cultural American experience.
Searching for our real selves
By searching the shelves
Lined with supersized and spring scents,
Low-fat slingbacks that come in your choice
Of midnight berry and super-moist cherry.
Deploying surface to air lip gloss,
Nursing the loss of assorted body parts
As frosted Pop Tarts rain from the sky.
Looking underneath yellow fevered dreams
To pick at “Made in China” labels
That won’t rub off.
I once brought dried pork floss and rice for my school lunch, and a chorus of “Eww! Gross!” rained over me. I demanded to my mom: “I need sandwiches!”
I know you know this story: minority kid grows up in America; dissonance ensues. You eat dried pork floss and mayo sandwiches and you pretend to know who Jesus is; it’s an Everywoman story. But it’s mine and I’m owning it.
I have wrestled with cultural fusion-confusion throughout my entire artistic career, collaging and warping images together in satirical ways. The American immigrant experience is a constant navigation between shrink-wrapped ideals and one’s own messier journey.
I suspect my use of humor and my affinity for surrealism is a result of being caught between, and feeling disconnected from, my Chinese and American backgrounds. Filtered through an off-kilter, slightly untethered worldview, my drawings and paintings playfully skewer the world around me and my own life. Sweeping, romantic postcard landscapes turn into cheese-filled tsunamis. My relationship with my mother becomes a deranged cataloging of love and resentment.
Being serious is easy. Funny is a difficult art. It requires a certain alchemy between aggression and pathos. You lure people into connecting seemingly disparate or contradictory ideas in an unconventional way. Humor happens when your audience, in a spark of recognition, recognizes how the preposterous and reality share the same light. There is power in humor. The unspeakable can be spoken; the bitter pill can be swallowed.
I create forked-tongued allegories that are funny and melancholic, sly and sentimental. The candied, goofball visuals are not just a veneer, but it is part of a conscious strategy to engage the viewer through an accessible visual vocabulary. It is also part of an artistic positioning in the belief that the absurd is merely the skid mark of human pathos, and out of the collision between irreverent narrative and social commentary, my art burps out a few collective truths.