Remember Me Like This

"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. A multidisciplinary artist working with photography, alternative processes, and mixed media, Liu has engaged with her family’s photographs since 2017 to probe the boundary between memory, history, and representation. The series draws on black-and-white family images made in China between the 1940s and the 1970s. Liu reprints selected images as silver gelatin prints and hand-paints each with ink and gouache. Dotted motifs obscure faces, contours soften, and surfaces are gently interrupted, transforming personal records into images that register through form and gesture rather than identity. Through these interventions, the work reflects on how photographs construct and withhold meaning, and on the human desire to see and to be seen. The book reproduces the series with careful attention to material detail, inviting readers to encounter the tactile tension between paint and silver print."