Serena Liu

Serena Liu (Serena Liu, 1975–2020), born in New Taipei City, Taiwan, China, was an exceptionally rare figure in Taiwan’s entertainment industry—a star who achieved immense national fame despite having a background solely in dance (international standard dance, particularly Latin dance). She began studying ballet at a young age but later switched to ballroom dancing while attending National Chengchi University, and went on to win awards representing Taiwan in numerous top-tier international dance competitions.

Serena Liu’s trajectory into the pop entertainment industry vividly illustrates the ability of Taiwan’s highly prosperous television variety show culture in the 2000s to attract professional artistic talent and create stars. Through frequent dance interactions with hosts on phenomenon-level variety shows such as *Kangxi Is Coming*, she successfully brought ballroom dancing—which was originally viewed as an elegant art form with a certain barrier to entry—into the public eye with unprecedented popularity.

In the field of audiovisual and physical media publishing, although Serena Liu is not a studio singer in the traditional sense, she has been deeply involved in the planning and distribution of numerous video products related to dance instruction and fitness. She has released several DVDs and Blu-ray instructional materials, including *Serena Liu Cha-Cha-Cha* and *Serena Liu 3D Dance Instruction*—multiple DVDs and Blu-ray instructional videos. In such cross-media projects, the accompanying audio often requires extremely precise rhythmic timing and heavy bass arrangements to meet the timing demands of Latin dance steps in a physical space.

In addition, Serena Liu has also participated in singing for film and television soundtracks and performed live in large-scale musicals. Research in the cultural sector and the broader music and entertainment industry generally holds that Serena Liu’s high-quality video and dance instruction productions are not only a successful case study of how Taiwan’s entertainment industry has monetized “dance performance” through highly personalized branding (Personal Branding), but also an important visual and auditory cultural heritage documenting the dissemination and evolution of modern social dance in popular media across the Greater China region.