Caitlyn Liu, Her, 2025, 32inx24in, Acrylic on Canvas
Her
By, Caitlyn Liu
March 30, 2025
This painting titled Her, is a depicted observation of a single woman who approached me on the Subway at 5:13 pm last Tuesday. My subway rides home from work commonly consist of a book, as service is spotty and I enjoy secluding myself from the subway’s chaos through literature. On this Tuesday, I was reading The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir, a novel exploring the complexities of womanhood, maturation, and femininity. Appearing to be in her 60s, a woman approached me, igniting a brief conversation to inquire about the book. For just a moment, the boundary between our separate lives had clouded and blurred. Her presence clung to me, not because of anything flamboyant but because of her innate curiosity, trust, and energy. Post encounter, I was left contemplating her presence, which felt grounded and layered, as if she were a woman who had lived many lives and carried them all at once. Influenced by my reading and the woman, I came to realize how disconnected I was from those around me. It urged me to reflect upon lives of those accompanying my transit home.
The visual constructs of the painting are not representational of her appearance but a reflection of what I felt and imagined during and after our interaction. The top figure remains still in motion, but her reflection is mirrored, fragmented, and abstracted. Her limbs twist into elongated, geometric shapes; her silhouette distorts like a reflection on a passing train window. She is both there and not there–she is forever fleeting, fluid, shifting, and unresolved. In this manner, Her became less about capturing literal appearance and more about embodying her essence and the invisible stories she might hold.
There is technically only one figure in the painting, but she is split in two–herself and her reflection. The duplicity becomes a metaphor for how women often move within urban life: always performing, adapting, and evolving. This city demands fluidity; it requires you to wear different versions of yourself depending on who you are, who is watching, and what space you occupy. This duality felt especially powerful in the context of this stranger, a woman who approached me not just as a commuter but as a woman engaging with another woman. For that moment, we were not just passengers on this subway but a quiet, untold lineage of women moving through this world.
This piece challenges the visual history of women's representation in art. In traditional Western paintings, women have been long portrayed as static subjects, idealized, reclining, and available for the viewer’s gaze. For example, works like Ingres’ Odalisque with Slace (1839) or Cabanel’s The Birth of Venus (1863) are prime examples of this genre. They demonstrate women stripped of context, flattened into objects of beauty, sensuality, or exoticism. They are not allowed to move, age, or exist outside the painter's desires. Her rejects this. Her is not about beauty or ornamentation but about transformation, tension, and interiority. My figure does not recline; she stretches, flickers, and is ever-evolving.
From a contemporary point of connection, Jordan Casteel’s Transit (2023) presents a powerful counter-narrative to the passivity of historical female subjects. Casteel often paints subjects with intense compassion and presence, grounding them in a specific time and place. In Casteel’s Transit, a woman sits with her sleeping child on the subway; her exhaustion is powerful, and her tenderness is immediate. Like Casteel, I am interested in capturing presence rather than perfection and telling stories of urban life's complexities, hardships, and unspoken truths.
The woman represented in Her exists between the lines of visibility and invisibility–she is seen briefly and remembered vividly. When painting Her, I wasn't just recreating an experienced moment; I was exploring the emotional and psychological spaces that moment created for me; a space that others experience every day in this city. The figure becomes a vessel for all the women I’ve encountered on the subway and all the lives that intersect briefly only to vanish.
As I was prompted to “picture people,” I initially felt overwhelmed by the vast options and directions I could go in a city with limitless options. I then found it quite challenging to nail down what I wanted to focus on. Upon interacting with the woman on the subway, I realized that I’ve been observing and mentally picturing people daily on the subway, a place where every stranger has a destination and holds a story. Ultimately, Her is not representative of just one woman. Her is about the quiet politics of movement, visibility, and feminine survival in New York City. It speaks of the duality of this city, how deeply someone can move you without knowing your name, honoring the minor encounters.