River He is primarily engaged in photography and textile creation, drawing inspiration from nature, philosophy, multiculturalism, symbols, and personal experience. Her creative journey began with ink painting during childhood, later evolving into photography and digital weaving. This progression reflects her continuous exploration of transformation—how images and concepts shift through different materials and mediums. Her work often embodies atavism, a return to primal, elemental forces, even as it engages with contemporary techniques.

In response to the tactile and visual properties of textiles, River transforms her photography and graphic designs into large-scale tapestries using digital weaving machines. Her textile creations prominently feature natural elements such as gold, wood, water, fire, earth, and air, symbolically linking ancient, universal forces to the human body and spirit. Through the lens of material imagination and somatic memory, she connects these elemental symbols with both personal and collective experiences, exploring how humanity is constantly evolving yet always drawn back to its ancestral roots.

Growing up in Chongqing, a city marked by hybrid landscapes of nature and towering skyscrapers, River’s perception of the relationship between nature and human culture has been deeply shaped. This fusion of the primitive and the modern is reflected not only in her subject matter but also in her creative methods. By combining AI-generated imagery with photography, and blending computer-aided design with traditional textile handcraft, she views technology as an extension of human creativity—an intersection where innovation and ancient practices coexist. This duality allows her to explore transformation in its fullest sense, balancing the old with the new, the natural with the digital.