Slivered Wake, A Cast Lance at RAINRAIN marks Zhi Wei Hiu’s New York solo debut, presenting works that transform photographic practice into an alchemical exploration of memory, image, and materiality. Drawing on analogue processes from the darkroom and metalsmith’s studio, Hiu constructs poetic, syncretic installations that consider what remains in the wake of seeing and recording.
Apparatus once used for image production—such as film tanks and enlargers—are recontextualized alongside personal and cultural relics, including seawater-damaged wristwatches, military firing pins, and family photographs. These materials are assembled in devotional arrangements reminiscent of Chinese folk shrines, suggesting an intimate, spiritual engagement with remembrance and decay.
Bronze and copper-framed structures protrude from the walls, housing images viewable only through reflections or angles, evoking street altars and complicating direct perception. Elsewhere, chemically treated silver gelatin plates and silverpoint drawings resist clear figuration, instead surfacing mirrored distortions and material transformations over time.
The only overtly representational images—photographs of Cambodian religious sites taken by Hiu’s uncle in the 1980s—are rephotographed to highlight fungal decay, aligning the degradation of both image and architecture. Throughout the exhibition, Hiu reframes photography as a ritual act, where surfaces shimmer with impermanence and the process of looking is both reverent and unstable.
