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.

Wang Xi