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.
