Kesi is not an easy word to say for an English speaker—it is pronounced kooh-su—but the breathtaking art form is immediately recognizable to most Westerners who have even a passing interest in Chinese culture and historical textiles. The intricate, beautiful silk tapestries made by master kesi weavers reached their peak as a high art form around the twelfth century during the Song dynasty. In modern China, however, this centuries-old tradition faces the quiet threat of fading into obscurity. Today, there are only eight people who are officially recognized by cultural authorities as true inheritors of the traditional kesi weaving technique.
One of these rare guardians of the craft is Jingwei, a dedicated young man from Suzhou who spends weeks meticulously weaving colored silks around a rigid structural frame, section by section, building images with astonishing precision and patience. Recognizing the urgency of preserving and documenting this fragile heritage, Lexar and Leica teamed up to create a unique collaborative project centered around the artist. To capture Jingwei’s process, they hired acclaimed photographer Jing Huang. No ordinary commercial photographer, Huang’s distinctive artistic vision focuses heavily on negative space, documenting the subtle edges of things rather than the literal subject itself.
“For me, photography is not only about recording time,” says Huang, reflecting on his artistic philosophy. “Sometimes it is about forgetting time. What stays in an image is not simply when or where it was taken, but whether it carries a sense of beauty that can still be felt beyond that moment.”
Indeed, the award-winning photographer’s work is deeply evocative and thoughtful, capturing fleeting glimpses of the world that typically require an extraordinary level of empathy to notice. Armed with an old Leica SLR camera and 35mm film, Huang set about creating a visual conversation between himself and the weaver, Jingwei, bridging two very different artistic mediums through a shared dedication to patience, restraint, and quiet observation.
The resulting body of work recently culminated in a high-profile exhibition at Leica Gallery Amsterdam, where the prints were showcased to European audiences. Linda Warmerdam, the manager and curator of Leica Gallery Amsterdam, reflected on the profound impact of the collaboration as the exhibition drew to a close.
“What makes this project meaningful is the dialogue between the photographer’s eye and the artisan’s hand,” says Warmerdam. “Through photography, audiences can encounter Suzhou kesi not only as a heritage object, but as a living process shaped by time, patience, and human presence.”
Huang’s approach to photography draws deep inspiration from traditional Chinese ink painting and minimalist small-format compositions. In his frames, he actively searches for stillness, restraint, and compositional balance—the very same elemental qualities that define the physical craft of kesi.
“What moves me most about kesi is its restraint,” says Jingwei, describing the philosophy behind his laborious craft. “It is not a free gesture. It is created within the order of warp and weft, built slowly through time, patience and the experience of the hand.”
While the artistic collaboration relies entirely on traditional, analog methods—ranging from manual wooden looms and silk threads to mechanical film cameras and silver-gelatin prints—the project itself was supported by Lexar, a major memory solutions company based in Shenzhen. Despite the inherently analog nature of both kesi weaving and film photography, Lexar explains that backing the exhibition represents a natural extension of its broader mission within the creative community.
“Lexar has always been close to the creative process—photographers, filmmakers, and creators rely on storage to protect work that often cannot be recreated,” Grace Su, General Manager of Lexar EU, tells PetaPixel.
Su notes that while the two traditional arts operate on vastly different temporal scales, they ultimately share a common philosophical foundation.
“Kesi builds an image over time, while photography often captures one in a fraction of a second,” Su adds. “लेकिन both depend on the same thing: a creator deciding what is worth seeing, and how it should be remembered.”
As the exhibition at Leica Gallery Amsterdam concludes, the project stands as a bridge between ancient craftsmanship and contemporary visual storytelling, capturing a rare traditional art form through a modern lens while honoring the quiet dedication required to keep it alive.
