JIMEI × ARLES INTERNATIONAL PHOTO FESTIVAL
THE RENCONTRES D’ARLES IN CHINA
Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival was co-initiated by Three Shadows Photography Art Centre and the Rencontres d’Arles in 2015. It is supported by the Jimei district committee of the CCP and the Jimei district local government, and co-hosted by Three Shadows and Xiamen Tianxia Jimei Media Co., Ltd. Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival introduces excellent photography works from all over the world with an inclusive and multicultural attitude and highlighting the latest international trends.
It supports and encourages the creation, study and curation of Chinese photography in order to make it accessible to the public and promote its presence on the international stage. Since its inception, Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival has presented nearly 300 exhibitions from China and other Asian countries, as well as a selection of outstanding works from the Rencontres d’Arles. Over 700 artists’ works have been presented and the festival has attracted a total of 550,000 visitors.
HU WEIYI - THE INNER DARKROOM
Written by Wang Xi
Through Erosion, Hu Weiyi visualizes the relationship between humanity and nature as a process of digestion and metabolism. Turning his own body into a living chemical reactor, he immersed the film rolls used to photograph natural landscapes in his own stomach acid, enabling the digestive process to alter the images in a completely unpredictable way. This “digestion” becomes a creative transformation: natural landscapes—altered by physiological processes—are imbued with individual perception and emotion.
In Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, she wrote that the camera lens often introduces a safe distance between the photographer and the subject. Through his intimate gesture, Hu Weiyi, completely upends this “bystander” approach, shifting nature from an object to be observed into something to be “metabolized” by the body.
In an era of proliferating digital images, Hu Weiyi’s Erosion turns inward, inviting new readings of life and nature through the lens of our inner world. Images are no longer an objective record, having instead acquired emotionally charged traces of an encounter between humanity and nature. Eroded by stomach acid, these images echo nature as it exists in our memories: familiar yet strange, growing new meanings through ongoing digestion and transformation.
ABOUT HU WEIYI
Born 1990 in Shanghai, China. Lives and works in Shanghai, China.
Hu Weiyi 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, Guangdong Times Museum, Minsheng Art Museum, CAFA Art Museum, and 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 Grant Jury Prize.
