"Hu Weiyi captured those elusive moments-these moments are not only a glimpse of the sacred mountain and holy lake that has not been touched by humans; they also refer to the erosion and change of the image by the artist in the dark room through stomach acid. The process echoes an individual’s experience of the holy land: In those landscapes where the mountains are surrounded by clouds and mist, the unknowable things are like clouds and mountains. Concealment and occultation, pollution and purity, body and nature... are covered one by one by the traces of erosion and the images left over."
-Sun Wenjie
All the works in this exhibition are derived from Hu Weiyi's latest series-"Erosion" created in 2021, for which the artist travelled to a more magnificent geographical and natural environment. In Shangri-La’s no man’s land, the artist photographed mountains and rocks and tried to use the camera to turn purely material mountains into complex research objects and present them on the photographic film, and then used the flat two-dimensional film as the secondary research object by extracting the artist himself. The gastric juice is used as a medium to simulate the structure of the human digestive system in vitro, and the strong acid of the gastric juice is used to corrode the negative film for re-creation. The hard image formed in the negative is covered under the muddy material and gastric juice, revealing the brilliant colors and charm of the landscapes in a ghostly manner. The entire creative process combines technical methods from different fields such as clinical medicine, photographic techniques, darkroom printing, and digital synthesis to break up various elements of traditional photography and combine them in a new way. "Erosion" is boldly conceived around multiple concepts such as "body-spirit", "capital-development", "harm-reconstruction", "nature-landscape", and "materiality-imagery". In-depth exploration of personal consciousness in the broader nature, re-understanding the connection between our individual and nature and even the complexity of the current world.
Hu Weiyi was born in 1990 in Shanghai, China. He graduated from the China Academy of Art with a BA in Public Art in 2013, concluding his studies with an MA in Media. He lives and works in Shanghai. His work has been the subject of major museum solo shows including the Asian Art Center Taipei and Ullens Center for Contemporary Art Beijing. Further exhibitions have included the Yuz Museum, Power Station of Art, Long Museum, MoCA Shanghai, Guang Dong Times Museum, Minsheng Art Museum, CAFA Art Museum, Hong Kong Arts Centre. His work has been exhibited at international institutions including Helmhaus Zürich, White Rabbit Gallery Chippendale, and V2 Rotterdam.In 2014 Hu Weiyi won the 2nd Art Sanya Huayu Youth Award.
