Hu Weiyi: The Artist Who Turns His Own Body Into Photographic Developer

Quick Answer: Hu Weiyi (b. 1990, Shanghai) is a Chinese multimedia artist who uses his own body, including gastric acid, hair, and blood, as material in his photographic process. His solo exhibition Deep Time opens September 19, 2026, at HdM Gallery Beijing, exploring the shared logic of depletion and transformation across the human body, plants, and geology, following his 2025 Jimei x Arles Discovery Award and a solo show at Les Rencontres d’Arles.

Hu Weiyi’s newest photographs are made partly of his own body. He has extracted his own gastric acid, hair, and blood. He uses them as developing agents on photographic film. The results are corroded and unpredictable. They anchor Deep Time, his solo exhibition opening September 19 at HdM Gallery in Beijing’s 798 Art District. Hu is not doing this as a stunt. He is asking what happens when a body, a plant, and a mountain range get treated as the same kind of material. All three are subject to the same slow processes: pressure, extraction, depletion.

A New Media Childhood, A Much Older Set of Questions

Hu Weiyi was born in Shanghai in 1990. He is the son of Hu Jieming, a pioneering figure in Chinese new media art. Hu studied at the China Academy of Art. He earned a BA in 2013 and an MFA in 2016, under Zhang Peili, one of the founders of Chinese video art. Growing up with that lineage could have pushed him toward pure technology. Instead his work keeps returning to something much older and slower: geology, the body, and the plants that connect the two.

A Body Dissolved on Film

In 2025 Hu won the Jimei x Arles Discovery Award. It is the top honor at China’s leading photography festival. He won it for The Inner Darkroom, a project built from film he had already dissolved in his own stomach acid. That film became the centerpiece of a solo exhibition at Les Rencontres d’Arles in France, one of the world’s most prestigious photography festivals. Reviewers called the work confrontational: degraded images from the artist’s own digestive process, hung as large, loose sheets rather than framed prints.

Thinking on a Geological Timescale

Deep Time borrows its title from James Hutton, the eighteenth-century Scottish geologist often called the father of modern geology. Deep time describes the scale of Earth’s history. It stretches far beyond a human lifespan, beyond recorded civilization, beyond our species itself. Over the past three years, Hu has traveled across China’s most extreme landscapes to think within that scale. He has visited the volcanic crater lake at Changbai Mountain and the sandstone spires of Zhangjiajie. He has also visited the open-pit coal mines of Fuxin and Fushun in Liaoning, and Hegang in Heilongjiang. There, industry has carved into the earth faster than any geological process could.

Body, Plant, Landscape, Screen

The exhibition is organized around four terms: body, plant, landscape, and screen. Hu treats the body as both visible and invisible. The image is a trace of the body. Biological material is its literal substance. He includes self-portraiture and family imagery, including photographs of his wife’s body after childbirth. He also includes photographs of scars carried by people from disadvantaged backgrounds, and images of skeletal remains recovered from old mining sites.

For Deep Time, Hu extends that same material logic from the human body into plants, for the first time. He uses flower-juice printing and botanical contact printing, historic photographic techniques that use plant pigment instead of chemical developer. Extracting color from a flower takes the same violence as extracting anything from a body, he points out: heat, pressure, and the destruction of the original form. Carboniferous-era plants, fossilized over hundreds of millions of years, became the coal and oil that built industrial civilization. Their overextraction now drives the resource crisis of the present. In Hu’s reading, plants are both a mirror for the fate of modern humans, and the literal material base modernity still runs on.

Folding Screens and Fault Lines

The screen, the exhibition’s fourth term, gives that idea a physical home. Hu sourced ten antique folding screens, each more than a century old. He mounted his photographs directly onto them, skipping conventional glass and metal frames. In the new series Double Screen, his wife’s pregnant belly sits beside abandoned open-pit mines. Skulls from a sky burial site in Sichuan’s Seda county sit beside cooling towers at a defunct power plant. All of it interweaves with fragments of serene, Song-dynasty-style ink landscapes rendered in gold and silver leaf.

The English word screen carries a useful double meaning here. It names both the antique object and a digital display. Walking past screen after screen is meant to echo something familiar: navigating fragmented digital interfaces, and trying, and failing, to look away from them.

Deep Time at HdM Gallery Beijing

Deep Time runs at HdM Gallery Beijing, in the 798 Art District, from September 19 through October 31, 2026. The opening reception takes place on Saturday, September 19, from 2 to 6pm.

Where Hu Weiyi Stands Now

Hu Weiyi has had gallery representation and institutional attention since his mid-twenties. He had a solo show at UCCA in Beijing in 2015, when he was 25. Since then he has exhibited at the Yuz Museum, Power Station of Art, Long Museum, MoMA PS1, and Zurich’s Helmhaus. His work is held in the White Rabbit Collection in Sydney, among other collections. His current run of recognition (the Jimei x Arles Discovery Award, the Arles show, and now Deep Time) marks a shift. The conceptual, technology-driven work of his twenties has given way to something slower and more physically extreme, built on geology and the artist’s own body.

That shift makes an odd kind of sense. Here is an artist who grew up around new media art. He has spent the past several years literally digesting the world around him, and calling it a photograph.

Deep Time runs at HdM Gallery Beijing through October 31, 2026. For a closer look at individual works, follow us on Instagram, where this week’s spotlight walks through the exhibition piece by piece.

Hu Weiyi: Frequently Asked Questions

Further Reading & Sources

• Hu Weiyi’s solo exhibition announced on Les Rencontres d’Arles’ official site
• China Daily’s coverage of Hu Weiyi’s award and Arles exhibition
• 1854 Photography’s review of The Inner Darkroom at Arles
• Hu Weiyi’s artist overview on HdM Gallery
• Hu Weiyi’s exhibition history on Ocula
• Hu Weiyi’s artist biography on White Rabbit Gallery

Related reading on chinaartlover: our list of 20 modern Chinese photographers, our Cai Guo-Qiang portrait, our interview with photo artist Li Zhang