Hu Weiyi | Deep Time
2026.09.19 — 2026.10.31
HdM Gallery is pleased to present Deep Time, the latest solo exhibition by Hu Weiyi, opening on September 19, 2026.
Building on Hu Weiyi’s exploration of the relationship between photography, materials, and the body in his 2021 solo exhibition Geography of the Body, this exhibition further expands the boundaries of photography toward broader material, historical, and geological realities.
His Erosion Series, conceived the ideas explored in Geography of the Body, received the 2025 Jimei × Arles Discovery Award and were presented in the artist’s solo exhibition The Inner Darkroom at Les Rencontres d’Arles, one of the world’s leading photography festivals, in July 2026.
The exhibition is structured around four key terms—“body,” “plant,” “landscape,” and “screen.” Through the intervention of found-object installations and the vast temporal scale of “deep time,” it draws viewers into a series of tensions between scenic beauty and geological rupture, permanence and depletion, and the body and systems of discipline, opening up a dialogue between geological transformation and the conditions of existence.
The exhibition will remain on view through October 31, 2026.
Deep Time
The exhibition takes its title, Deep Time, from a concept rooted in the geological thinking of James Hutton, often regarded as the father of modern geology. In geology, the term refers to the immense timescale of Earth’s history—one that extends far beyond the lifespan of the human body, the span of recorded civilization, and even the existence of the human species.
Over the past three years, Hu Weiyi has conducted extensive field research across China, from the volcanic crater of Tianchi in Changbai Mountain and the sandstone peaks of Zhangjiajie to the vast open-pit coal mines and industrial sites of Fuxin and Fushun in Liaoning Province and Hegang in Heilongjiang Province. Moving between primordial natural landscapes and terrains profoundly reshaped by human industry, he situates human activity within the vast temporal scale of deep time through his artistic practice.
As the temporal horizon extends beyond the limits of ordinary human perception, deep time brings into focus a dialectical tension between transience and permanence in the microscopic cycles of life, the depletion of the present, and the geological processes that shape the Earth.
The Visible and Invisible Body
The body has remained a recurring presence throughout Hu Weiyi’s practice, manifesting in both visible and invisible forms: the image as a trace of the body, and material as the tangible substance of the flesh.
In this exhibition, Hu Weiyi incorporates into his artistic practice images he has recorded in recent years, including scars borne by people from disadvantaged social backgrounds, the bodily changes his wife experienced after childbirth, and the skeletal remains of miners. These images confront the cycles of depletion, death, and renewal inherent in life. At the same time, he directly extracts biological materials—including gastric acid, hair, and blood—from his own body and introduces them into the image-making process, allowing the materiality of the flesh to infuse these “visible bodies.”
In his latest works, Hu introduces the technique of flower-juice printing and botanical contact printing in his practice for the first time, extending his investigation of bodily materiality from the human body into the vegetal realm. Much like the extraction of biological matter from the human body, the pigments contained within plants must be released through intense heat and pressure, a process that destroys their original forms.
The fossil fuels formed from the remains of Carboniferous plants hundreds of millions of years ago have served both as the material spark that fueled modern industrial civilization and, through their excessive extraction today, as a sign of the crisis of resource depletion. Plants thus emerge both as a living mirror of the fate of modern human beings and as the material foundation upon which modernity as a whole has been built and continues to operate.
Folding Screens and Fault Lines
As a classic medium in East Asian aesthetics and everyday spatial life, the screen serves as a central carrier for the multiple perspectives brought together in this exhibition. Continuing the artistic approach to found objects developed in his Pulp Landscape series, Hu Weiyi eschews modern industrial framing and instead directly integrates his images into ten antique screens, each with a history of more than a century.
In his new series Double Screen, the aged patina of the screens themselves, fragments of Song-dynasty painting, and reliefs in gold and silver leaf come into intense friction with stark contemporary imagery. The images include the pregnant belly of the artist’s wife, vast abandoned open-pit mines, skulls from the sky-burial site in Seda, cooling towers at a disused power station, barren and depleted mountains, and close-ups of intensely vital plants. These images are tightly interwoven with serene, Zen-inflected literati landscapes across the folded planes of the screens. Drawing on the historical character and singularity of these antique screens, the artist evokes a silent confrontation, on the scale of “deep time,” between resource depletion, historical rupture, and the poeticized imaginary of the Eastern literati tradition. Significantly, just as the English word “screen” refers both to the traditional screen and to the contemporary digital display, viewers wander through spaces fragmented by the antique screens, echoing the contemporary experience of navigating fragmented digital screens and seeking to break free from them.
The four key terms—“body,” “plant,” “landscape,” and “screen”—unfold progressively, forming a complete narrative cycle within the exhibition. The body and plants share a metabolic trajectory of depletion, transformation, and reconfiguration; landscapes are enriched and sustained by ancient plant life, yet also driven into collapse by the excessive extraction of fossil fuels; while the “screen” functions both as a material vessel of traditional culture and as an interface through which contemporary individuals confront a fragmented reality in isolation.
Through images, biological materials, and the orchestration of space, Hu Weiyi juxtaposes the warmth of the human body at the microscopic scale with the scars left by geological transformation at the macro scale, situating them within the vast temporal framework of “deep time” and reconfiguring the viewer’s experience of confronting reality and history.
About the Artist
Hu Weiyi (b. 1990, Shanghai) lives and works in Shanghai. He received his master’s degree from the School of Intermedia Art at China Academy of Art, in 2016. Working primarily with images and installation, his practice explores the gaps between technological logic and the material world. He often draws on public images, historical narratives, and everyday objects, placing them within self-developed visual systems and re-encoding them through these systems. In recent years, he has introduced biological materials such as gastric acid, flower juice, and blood into the image-making process. Through a form of “contemporary alchemy,” he questions the certainty of photography while amplifying the role of chance in the generation of images.
Hu received the Jimei × Arles Discovery Award at the Jimei × Arles International Photo Festival and the 2025 Golden Panda Photography Award, as well as the Grand Prize of the Huayu Youth Award in 2014. He was shortlisted for Young Artist of the Year, Award of Art China (AAC) in 2015 and 2016 Sovereign Asian Art Prize(Grand Prize). His works have been exhibited at institutions including Helmhaus, Zurich; UCCA Center for Contemporary Art; Power Station of Art (PSA), Shanghai; Long Museum; and Yuz Museum, among others, and are held in collections.
