Weiling He experiments across various media: architecture, art installations, writing, drawing, and video. Seeking a fundamental understanding of space, her work focuses on Formalism and the breakaway from it.
Born in Shanghai, China, Weiling He is a US-based architecture professor who has been exploring design principles outside the discipline. She holds a PhD from the Georgia Institute of Technology, studying John Hejduk’s early architectural work in relation to painting, poetry, and drawing. In 2008, her further studies on Hejduk’s drawings received the Research and Development Grant from Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in Fine Arts.
Weiling He experiments with various media, such as art installations, videos, and watercolor paintings. Her work and writing focus on translation across art forms, diagramming, and materiality and making. In the area of installation specifically, The Cut was based on John Hejduk’s translations of “otherness” through the poem, “France Is Far.” The project was made of metal pieces, glass, and light projection. In 2008, a video of The Cut was exhibited at the First Conference on Phenomenology between 10 Philosophers and 10 Architects from China, organized by Time + Architecture and Tongji University Press. In 2013, she led a team to win the Curtain’s international competition called by the Center for American Architecture and Design at the University of Texas in Austin. The project, Plastic Poetry, was constructed with 14,000 plastic shopping bags on the UT campus in October 2013. Since then, He has been focusing on aesthetic potentials of disposable plastic materials. In February 2014, she was the invited artist to work on an interior installation with 2,000 plastic water bottles, at the Royal Academy of Arts (KKH) in Stockholm, Sweden. In November 2015, she worked with a team from the community to complete an outdoor shading/light piece from 3,000 milk jugs at the Brazos Valley African American Museum.
In addition, Weiling He has published numerous papers and articles at prestigious journals and conferences, including Journal of Architecture, National Conference on Beginning Design Students, and Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Annual Meeting, discussing design translation, drawing, materiality, and design studio pedagogy. Her students’ work, The Basilica Façade by Andrea Palladio, a sequence of charcoal renderings won Jury’s Choice Award, at the at the Bi-annual Exhibition of the Design Communication Association, Ball State University, Indiana in 2007.