The Inner Obscura
In contemporary art, Hu Weiyi's Erosion series delivers a profound inquiry into the essence of imagery. This young artist chooses to transform himself into a living chemical reaction device—he dips the film that has captured mountains, rivers, and natural landscapes into his own gastric acid, allowing this digestive fluid to unpredictably transform the images. This act introduces the relationship between humans and nature into an entirely new dimension.
Susan Sontag pointed out in Regarding the Pain of Others that the camera lens often establishes a safe distance between the photographer and the subject. Hu Weiyi's Erosion completely subverts this "bystander" stance. When the magnificent images of mountains and rivers are immersed in gastric acid, the artist is essentially using his most private internal bodily environment to "digest" the grandest natural landscapes. This process breaks down the boundary between the human body's interior and the external nature, transforming nature from an object of observation into a subject "metabolized" by the body.
Different from his earlier Blue Bone series, where he worked with others' X-ray films, Erosion demonstrates a more direct bodily involvement. The artist partially surrenders the initiative of creation to bodily functions—physiological variables such as the concentration of gastric acid and the duration of its action all become "co-authors" that shape the images. After undergoing internal digestion by the body, the captured natural landscapes acquire an new vitality.
In the final presented images, the outlines of mountains and rivers become blurred under the erosion of gastric acid, with natural landscapes and chemical traces merging into one another. These natural images "digested" by the body not only retain fragments of the original landscapes but also carry the marks of the body's influence. They are no longer objective records but emotional relics of human-nature interaction.
Through Erosion, Hu Weiyi materializes the relationship between humans and nature as a process of digestive metabolism. We digest our perceptual experiences of nature just as we digest food. This "digestion" is a transformative process full of creativity—after passing through the internal environment of the body, natural landscapes are endowed with personalized understanding and emotions.
In an era flooded with digital images, Hu Weiyi's Erosion offers us a new interpretation of life and nature derived from the inner world. The images eroded by gastric acid are precisely like nature in our memories—both familiar and unfamiliar, and in the constant process of digestion and transformation, they grow new meanings.
Observe those captivating details: the dissolution of the chemical film caused by corrosion, which blurs into vein-like networks, and the colors bursting forth with their final splendor amid fading. None of these are realities can be simulated by digital effects; they are the material world's most honest expressions.
In the digital age that pursues perfection and permanence, Hu Weiyi's works instead give us a sense of relief. They tell us: change is inevitable, and decay is also a form of beauty. Just as we accept that we will grow old and develop wrinkles, perhaps we can also learn to love the flaws and transformations of images.
Let go of your senses and directly experience these works that are in the midst of happening. They are not static paintings but slices of the life process. Here, let us rethink together: what is truth? What is eternity? Perhaps the answers lie within these images that seem to breathe.
Text / Wang Xi
