ArtDepot is pleased to announce the solo exhibition Vacuum by artist Hu Jiebin at its gallery space in Beijing’s 798 Art District. The exhibition will present over ten recent easel works, using lacquer texture to evoke the ethereal and tangible qualities of rain and, in its rising and falling, flow and return, to interpret the Eastern cultural return to the source of “true emptiness and wondrous existence.”

Rain has no self-nature, yet it nourishes with order.
 

Hu Jiebin takes rain as his medium, carrying nature’s law. Rain falls, seeps, settles, transforms, and rises again—a cycle of recurrence. It has no fixed form: cloud, rain, vapor, moisture in soil. We cannot grasp a drop’s essence, for its very being is constant transformation and return. This is the most immediate natural prototype of “true emptiness and wondrous existence.”
 

Raw lacquer and tile ash offer a material isomorphism. Repeated layering strips away embellishment through destruction and reconstruction, revealing the material’s true nature. Coarse tile ash and warm lacquer embed in one another—not to reproduce rain, but to reenact its philosophical fate through the physical fate of matter. Rain cycles between sky and earth; lacquer and ash between layering and grinding revelation; creation between attachment and dissolution.

《雨痕系列一》 大漆、瓦灰，160×160cm，2026
 

As material process itself becomes the content, the theme rises from rain’s form to its law, allowing traditional media to speak anew in a contemporary context. Each coating is sedimentation; each grinding, selective forgetting. Grinding does not erase but redistributes the visible and invisible: what is ground away becomes the support beneath, the ground for what emerges. Uncertainty runs throughout.
 

The work is not a preset image but a sediment of negotiation between process and material. Time leaves traces in matter; matter rewrites time; memory is rearranged between layering and grinding, each arrangement unforeseen.
 

Rain returns to earth; lacquer to its true nature. Traces ground away yet faintly visible, new layers covering yet depending on the old—they neither explain emptiness nor prove existence. They simply remain, letting lacquer’s texture write rain’s void and solidity, and in rise and return, interpret the Eastern return to the source of true emptiness and wondrous existence.

《秋至系列一》 大漆、瓦灰，80×60cm，2026