Photographer Lisa Tang Liu made a career out of taking other people’s portraits. But she was never interested in taking her own photo — not even selfies on her phone.

Then Covid hit, and some old, bad feelings from her childhood began to return.

Having grown up in a predominantly white suburb in New Jersey as a child, she said, she felt “a sense of shame” for being Chinese. She wanted those around her to embrace that she was as American as anyone else, and to stop asking questions like where she was really from.

“And I think that sense of shame came back very much — like very hard — during Covid.”

At the time, Pres. Donald Trump, during his first term, called the respiratory disease “the Kung flu.”

Conspiracy theories were spreading as quickly as the virus, and attacks against Asian Americans were on the rise and in the news.

All this made Tang Liu — now a mother with her own children — want to hide from the public ­— not necessarily for fear of getting sick, but for fear of becoming a target of others’ anti-Asian racism.

So, she turned to her art. She picked up her film cameras and began experimenting. Only, this time she was not taking the wedding photos that she had built a second career on after leaving the corporate world decades ago. She was exploring a novel subject: herself.

“I started making these self portraits, because I was kind of hiding during Covid; I didn’t want to show my face,” she said. “And, afterward, I was like, ‘You know what? This is just stupid.’ So I started making self portraits.”

She’s since created a portfolio of conceptual images of herself that are both personal and universal to the Asian American — and even immigrant — experience. Most make use of cyanotype — or sun printing. Nine of the works are now on display at the Danforth Museum in Framingham for the “Selfhood” exhibit that includes images by several artists who explore identity — and, as the museum states, “voices that have historically been threatened, silenced, and hidden.” The show runs through June 8.

For Tang Liu, this was an opportunity to declare she is American — and to confront her own feelings.
“I just wanted to express my own frustration,” she said. “I am hoping that people would see my face against the American flag and, like, normalize the idea that there are Americans, plenty of Americans out there, with Asian faces.”

The artist came to the U.S. at age nine, and got her citizenship at 15. “Ever since I was a kid I have been thinking about how what being American means,” says Tang Liu. “I wanted to be … American.”

Several of her works blend red, white and blue colors with images of her face and sometimes other symbolism like the American flag or Chinese characters. Some are monochrome, and black and white photos and photo composites. The work, “Analog Girl in a Digital World,” takes strips of cyanotype print and ink-jet print and weaves them together to form an interpretive portrait that upon a first glance is vaguely reminiscent of the Mona Lisa. “Facing a New Era” is a double-exposure of a profile view of Tang Liu over the American flag and uses cyanotype and watercolor paper.

Though she was interested in art from a young age, Tang Liu said she wasn’t permitted to major in the subject in college so entered the “corporate world” after concentrating in computer science at Wellesley College. For a while she worked in information technology at startups and then for a couple years at a large investment bank in Tokyo. But following 9/11 and the dot-com bubble bust just prior, she pursued wedding photography.

Married to the science fiction and fantasy author Ken Liu, she has two daughters. She eventually studied at the New England School of Photography in the early 2000s and recently began seriously showing her art. She was selected for the 28th annual Exposure show at the Photographic Resource Center, exhibited at Panopticon Gallery and at various places in Massachusetts, Vermont, New York, Arizona and Texas.

But the questioning of her identity would reoccur over the years throughout her life, even when abroad — revealing just how much the world itself has internalized the stereotype of what is a typical American. While an exchange student in Japan when she was younger, Tang Liu recalls, her Americanness was questioned.

“We went as a group to visit an elementary school in Kyoto. And it was funny because the kids, looked at me very confused, like, ‘Is she an American?’”

Over the years she considered how the center of this identity question was one of belonging.

“All my life, I’ve been trying to assimilate, right? I mean, how do you feel like you belong somewhere? I think this, there’s a more universal level to belonging, and not just, you know, limited to immigrants alone, but I think you feel it much more as an immigrant.”

Tang Liu said she feels Asian Americans, especially in her experience Chinese Americans, tend to avoid discussing uncomfortable topics, such as those which she confronts in her images in “Selfhood.” But, she suggested, failure to speak out could have real consequences.

“I feel like they just don’t really want to talk about it,” she said. “They just want to say, ‘OK, we assimilate, and we’re part of American society. But I feel like that acceptance — to really be accepted as American — is kind of precarious when there are political events that happen that may accentuate your ethnic background. So, for instance, I feel that we’re actually not immune to, say, an internment camp, if there’s, God forbid, ever a war with China. I feel like, especially with this administration, it could happen again.”

Lisa Tang Liu will attend an artist panel on April 27 at 3 p.m. at the Danforth Art Museum.