Hu Shaoming, a young and talented art student from Guangzhou Art Academy has recently attracted the unexpected attention of the local art world with his curious exhibition entitled “Reconnecting Time” (“He: Shiguan Xilie” in Chinese).

Supported by Guangzhou Art Academy, he developed the project as an essay within the frame of his studies. “It was just homework,” he says, “but I always put a lot of energies and take the maximum out of these tasks.” Hu has collected four different objects from four countries—UK, US, Japan and France—and four decades, all representing his keen interest for old mechanics: a phone from the 1910s, a clock from the 1920s, a camera from the 1930s and a portable film camera from the 1940s. In four months’ time he entirely disassembled them, one by one, and embedded a metal zipper in each one, opening a breach on the gears behind the surface. “I used the zipper to open a window on these great industrial discoveries of humanity,” says Hu. “I feel like I’m bringing history back to the present. Breaking the objects into parts, reassembling them, inlaying a zipper, it’s been a way to communicate with time and reconnect with the past. It’s often been a challenging work because I also had to preserve the nature of the original objects, without damaging or corrupting them.”

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