Remember Me Like This

INTRODUCTION
 
Everyone carries a desire, to remember, and to be remembered. 
In Remember Me Like This, Rachel M. Liu turns to her family photo archive to examine how memory is shaped, staged, and reimagined through the photographic image.

As a multidisciplinary artist working across photography, alternative processes, and mixed media, Liu has long been drawn to the inherent contradictions within the photographic medium, focusing on how images can be at once factual and fictitious, forthcoming and withholding, precise and ambiguous. Since 2017, she has engaged with her own family’s photo archive as source material, probing the delicate terrain between memory, history, and representation. 
 
The series draws from a collection of black-and-white photographs of Liu’s immediate and extended family, taken between the 1940s and 1970s in China. These images, composed and seemingly serene, remain silent in the face of the historical weight surrounding them. Reprinted as silver gelatin prints and hand-painted with ink and gouache, each photograph is reworked through physical gesture. Faces are covered with dotted patterns, contours softened or blurred, and surfaces gently interrupted. In Liu’s process, the original photographs begin to shift in meaning. The family members become less recognisable, and the images begin to speak through form and gesture rather than personal identity.
 
Through these layered interventions, Liu reflects on how memory is constructed, and how photography holds a poetic yet unstable relationship to truth. The family album becomes not a documentary record, but a symbolic field: one that holds both the intimacy of seeing and the opacity of remembering.
 
Remember Me Like This does not seek to present a clear story. Instead, it creates a space where recollection is fragmentary, presence is spectral, and familiar images suggest more than they explain. In Liu’s hands, image and memory are not fixed but fluid. The act of looking becomes both intimate and distant, tied to the enduring human desire to see and to be seen.
 
 
ABOUT ARTIST
 
Born in Qingdao, China, Liu immigrated to the United States when she was 14. Prior to her art career, she worked as a corporate litigation attorney in New York City. In 2011, she began studying painting at Rhode Island School of Art and Design where she was first introduced to traditional darkroom photography and became intrigued with the medium ever since. In 2012, Liu switched her focus from painting to photography. She earned her MFA degree in Photography in 2015. 
 
Liu has been actively exhibiting in shows throughout the United States and abroad since 2016, and has received several prestigious awards including First Place Single Image Winner of LensCulture's Inaugural Art Photography Award and the Julia Margaret Cameron Award for Women Photographers. Her work has been featured in publications such as The New Yorker and Photography of China. Selected residencies include Minnesota Street Project Adjacent Virtual Residency and Center for Photography at Woodstock, New York. 
 
She currently lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.
 
 
SPECIFICATIONS
 
Art Direction: Zhen SHI
Design: Yinhe Cheng
Text credit: © Rachel Liu
ISBN: 978-2-9585094-4-6
Publication date: July 2025