A Family Album · 2018 —

Muxinji

Liu Xiang / Family Imagery

In the summer of 2018, I lifted the camera for the first time as a father, thinking I was recording the arrival of a child. Looking back years later, what the lens truly preserved was how a family shaped one another over time. My elder daughter is named Muxin and my younger daughter Mushi. The movement from Mu to Mu is also my own process of becoming a father: from panic and clumsiness to learning responsibility, and also learning to let go. This body of family imagery is not a parenting album. It is more like a mirror: the children are growing, and the parents are being re-educated. Children are not their parents' works; they come into the world through us, and through them we relearn love, responsibility and the limits of ourselves.

Ant Photography Award Grand Prize / Lianzhou International Foto Festival Invitational Exhibition
Selected for the National Photography Exhibition / Popular Photography cover feature
Full-page publication in China Photography News / Independent photobook publication

Scroll Down

Main Hall / Works

Main Hall — Complete Works

Side Hall / Her Voice

Side Hall - Her Chronicle by Wang Jianan

While the father used a professional camera to build the family's visual narrative, the mother, Wang Jianan, recorded the same life in a completely different way: handmade albums, black cardstock, cut photographs, handwritten diaries in colored pen, spontaneous drawings and stickers. This is not a translation or annotation of the same story, but a second voice that grew naturally from inside the family. Here there is no concern for composition or light, only a mother's most private feelings: swollen legs during pregnancy, the exhaustion of feeding at three in the morning, the surprise of seeing a child smile for the first time. If the father's lens is a gaze, the mother's notebook is a murmur.

Time Hall / A Day in Muxin's Life

Time Hall — One Day at Ten Months

On one day when Muxin was 10 months old, nothing special happened. Starting at midnight, I made one photograph every half hour, 48 images in total. None of the photographs were directed, cropped or color-graded. Like an emotionless clock, they faithfully recorded an infant's most ordinary day. Yet within this almost mechanical repetition, time itself becomes the subject: sleep in the early morning, morning light, afternoon play, evening quiet and sleep again late at night. When the day ends, nothing has happened, and everything has happened.
Time passes swiftly, and life continues without end.

00:01

Late Night

Timeline photograph from one day in Muxin's life

00:0006:0012:0018:0024:00

Archive Hall / Echoes

Archive Hall — Resonance

A set of family photographs traveled from the living room to places much farther away. It became a photobook, appeared on a magazine cover, entered exhibitions and was written into photography teaching material. These are not displays of honor, but a simple proof: when private feeling is expressed honestly, it gains the ability to resonate with strangers. The power of family imagery has never rested in technique, but in truth.

Swipe horizontally to browse