Leica x Lexar: Inside the Threads of Time Exhibition

Threads of Time is an exploration of legacy and lens. It is a collaborative project between kesi artist Jingwei and photographer Jing Huang, presented at the Leica Gallery in Amsterdam. I went along to see how this collaboration was woven together in a gallery setting.

The exhibition brings together a body of kesi silk tapestry work by Jingwei alongside a photographic series made by Huang during time spent in Suzhou. It's a small show by square footage, but one that asks visitors to slow down. The material rewards close, patient looking rather than a quick pass along the walls.

Jingwei and the Kesi Technique

Jingwei is a contemporary kesi artist based in Suzhou, China. Kesi is a Chinese silk tapestry technique built on a fixed warp, with colored wefts worked in section by section. It is slow and extremely precise work, traditionally described in China as "an inch of kesi, an inch of gold." The wider tradition of sericulture and silk craftsmanship in China was inscribed by UNESCO on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009.

The technique itself involves continuous warp threads, which run the length of the piece and form its underlying structure, while color is introduced locally. Each weft of silk is worked in to build up the pattern piece by piece, rather than running across the full width of the work. Contour, shading, and fine detail all emerge gradually, through decisions made during the weaving process itself rather than being planned out in advance and simply executed.

Jingwei has practiced kesi for more than a decade and is recognized as a representative inheritor of Suzhou kesi weaving. His practice began with years spent learning to build control over thread, color, and the relationship between warp and weft. Over time, he's moved beyond established, historical motifs toward work shaped by his own observation and artistic references. One piece in the exhibition takes its color, movement, and atmosphere from a Suzhou garden, and another from Van Gogh. It's a reminder that kesi, in his hands, isn't a fixed vocabulary being preserved for its own sake.

"People often see kesi as a finished object, but for me it is a way of thinking through silk. The structure is traditional, but every work asks for new decisions about color, rhythm and form." — Jingwei, Contemporary Kesi Artist

Jing Huang's Photographic Approach to the Series

Jing Huang is the photographer behind the project and the recipient of the 2011 Leica Oskar Barnack Newcomer Award for his earlier series Pure of Sight. His work often places emotional expression, environment, and the relationships between elements in the frame ahead of literal subject matter, and that shows throughout his works.

Rather than documenting Jingwei's process step by step, Huang went looking for fragments of the working environment that could be felt before they could be explained.

He uses selective framing and negative space to let the work move beyond literal description, treating it as more of a visual response to another art form rather than a record of how that art form is made. His Suzhou series moves between the artist, the silk threads, the studio, and quieter details of the surroundings in Suzhou.

Capturing a contemporary production of a centuries-old practice requires a different photographic approach than capturing a demonstration of technique, and Huang's work makes that distinction obvious immediately. Several of the images are reminiscent of tapestries themselves, delicate and appearing almost woven in the frame the way kesi is woven thread by thread. The photographic approach works from the same instincts as the silk work it sits alongside, rather than simply pointing a lens at it.

A Collaboration, Not a Documentation

Normally, a photographic exhibition built around a craftsperson's practice exists to document their process, and the photographer's work becomes secondary by design. Threads of Time doesn't do that. Instead, it is a collaboration that honors each practice in its own place, rather than folding one into the service of the other.

The flow of the exhibition layout illustrates this beautifully. Curator Linda Warmerdam has created a dialogue between two distinct visual practices without making either one secondary. Visitors move between Jingwei's finished silk works and Huang's photographs without either being used as a caption for the other. Neither practice is positioned as the subject and the other as the record of it. Kesi and photography sit with equal weight in the room, each asking to be looked at on its own terms before you start drawing lines between them. That structure moves visitors through observation and dialogue, allowing visual connections between the two practices to emerge through surface, composition, texture, and color.

I've spent time with the team at Lexar before, visiting their manufacturing and testing facilities to see the quality behind their memory storage products firsthand, so I already have trust in what that name represents. Here in this exhibition space within Leica Amsterdam, Lexar and Leica have supported both artists behind the scenes to bring this collaboration to fruition. Leica captures the moment, while Lexar helps preserve the memory that will never exist again. This is a symbol that two very different ways of providing visibility can be given the same room, and the same weight, and still both come out stronger for it.

Images used with permission from Lexar Europe