Some images take a fraction of a second. Others take weeks of thread. Threads of Time: A Journey Through Silk and Lens, an exhibition backed by Lexar and Leica, put the two side by side at Leica Gallery Amsterdam. It opened on September 11, 2026 and has since closed. The show paired photographer Jing Huang with Jingwei, one of the few remaining masters of Suzhou kesi, a centuries-old Chinese silk tapestry technique.
An art form with eight official heirs
Kesi is pronounced roughly “kooh-su”. Most Westerners with even a passing interest in Chinese culture would recognize these fine silk tapestries, even if the name is unfamiliar. The craft reached its peak around the twelfth century. In modern China, only eight people are officially recognized as inheritors of the traditional kesi weaving technique.
Jingwei, whose given name is Hao Naiqiang, is one of them. He is a young artisan from Suzhou who spends weeks weaving colored silks section by section, building an image thread by thread inside the fixed grid of warp and weft. “What moves me most about kesi is its restraint,” he says. “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.”
A photographer who shoots the edges
Jing Huang, a Leica award-winning photographer hired for the project, is an unusual match for a documentary brief. His work centers on negative space. He tends to photograph the edges of things rather than the things themselves, and his framing draws on Chinese ink painting and small-format compositions, with an eye for stillness, restraint and balance. Those same qualities run through kesi.
For this project Huang worked with an old Leica SLR loaded with 35mm film, which kept the process as slow and deliberate as the weaving he was recording. The resulting photographs show the people, tools, textures and gestures of the studio, and he framed the series as a conversation between himself and Jingwei. “For me, photography is not only about recording time,” Huang says. “Sometimes it is about forgetting time.”
Linda Warmerdam, manager and curator of Leica Gallery Amsterdam, described the exhibition as “the dialogue between the photographer’s eye and the artisan’s hand.” In her words, it let audiences see Suzhou kesi “not only as a heritage object, but as a living process shaped by time, patience, and human presence.”
Why a memory-card maker is involved
It may seem odd for Shenzhen-based storage company Lexar to sponsor a show built on film and silk. The company calls it a “natural extension” of its business. “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, told PetaPixel.
Su also drew the parallel the whole show is built around. “Kesi builds an image over time, while photography often captures one in a fraction of a second. But both depend on the same thing: a creator deciding what is worth seeing, and how it should be remembered.”
Brand-sponsored art shows are nothing new. This one is worth noting because it spends its budget on a craft few people have seen made up close, and on a photographer patient enough to match its pace.
