Rachel Liu (b. Qingdao, China) is a visual artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. 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.
Rachel Liu is the recipient of several prestigious awards. Most recently, she was awarded 1st Place Single Image Winner of LensCulture's inaugural Art Photography Award 2018. In the same year, she was also selected as one of twelve artists at Root Division's juried exhibition showcasing emerging talents and cutting edge art of the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has been featured on Photography of China, Fortune, AYE Mag, and LensCulture.
Rachel received her MFA degree in Photography in 2015. Selected grant and residencies include Vermont Studio Center and Kala Art Institute. 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.
Before Silicon Valley was a TV show or a byword for success and innovation—it was a landscape. These contemplative photos mix past, present and future, allowing us to see through the furiously changing cycles of the moment—and thus with greater stillness and clarity.
