-- Artist statement
In “Aesthetics or Truth”, Tod Papageorge wrote about how photography’s transparent quality and the camera’s mimetic nature make most people look at photography differently from paintings, poetry, or films where fictional and subjective qualities are presumed. The lack of such presumptions when looking at photography make people easily fall into the trap of associating photography with truth. I fell into such trap a few years ago when I first discovered a large collection of old family photographs during a visit to my native country China. Having lived abroad for over twenty years, I held onto those photos as though they were the only tangible thing connecting me to my roots. Yet, the more I looked at them, the less reliable and satisfactory they became, and more photographic artifice began to surface. Since then, my projects have developed around this collection of personal family photographs in which I examine the nature of the photographic medium, particularly that of the personal and family photographs in relation to history, memory and records.
In “Remember Me Like This,” I reproduced selected family photographs taken during the Cultural Revolution, a socially and politically tumultuous period in China’s modern history, as starting point. I hand manipulated them using traditional pictorial art technique and materials. I chose photos taken during this particular time frame because of the striking discrepancies between what the photographs depict on the surface and the reality of the times. Images of youthful optimism and family felicity stood in sharp contrast to scarring memories of deprivation and feelings of bitterness evoked by these photos. The physical manipulations of photographs obscuring the boundary between photography and painting, the motif of dots obscuring the faces, make these family photos no longer about the individuals photographed, nor about the truth. They become symbols, archetypes, and photography’s poetic moment of truth rather than reality. They demand the viewers to see not with the presumptions of familiar family photographs but as constructed pictures, and provoke reflection on the question of what is it that we seek to fulfill in our personal and family photographic collection and memory.
Rachel Liu (b. Qingdao, China) is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily with photography, alternative processes, and mixed media. Her work examines the dichotomy between photography's indexical and evidentiary nature, and its resistance and limitation to becoming trustworthy documents. The inherent paradoxical nature of the medium has informed many aspects of her practice. Recently, she has been working on projects based off of an extensive family photo archive that she found during a visit to her native country China. She was intrigued by the complex emotions they invoked both in herself and in family members, and it led her to a series of experimentations with these found photos. Her ongoing projects reflect upon the nature of the photographic medium, and the function of the personal and family photographs in relation to memory and history.
Rachel is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including First Place Single Image Winner of LensCulture's Inaugural Art Photography Award, and Julia Margaret Cameron Award for Women Photographers, Honorable Mention. Her work has been featured on The New Yorker, Photography of China, Fortune, and LensCulture. Selected grant and residencies include Center For Photography at Woodstock, NY, and Vermont Studio Center. She currently lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.
More information: www.rachelliu.com
