Lin Ke presents his continued fascination with the ever-blurring boundaries between digitally manufactured spaces of our computer age and traditional reality. For his presentation at Frieze London Lin posits a series of conventional watercolor works, UV prints on various mediums, desktop images enlarged to architectural scale and an animation of his 3D exhibition model as vehicles for exploring this tenuous terrain. By creating a meta-space, whereby computer software and its processes of rendering artworks and an exhibition setting are exposed, Lin’s self-referential project questions the validity of material objects in a world where they are constantly attenuated by their image.
Starting from a series of traditional hand-painted watercolors, Lin began a process of deduction and analysis by scanning the works and breaking them into layered elements, almost like a forensic detective in search of pictorial essence. Sky Paintings re-present the digitized remains of these watercolors as reconstituted UV prints on various surfaces. Through the journey of analysis, conversion, and re-production Lin Ke questions the import and nature of artistic medium, image making, as well as exhibition conventions.
Lin’s Sky Paintings has won great critical attention through solo exhibitions at the Zhejiang Museum of Art, Hangzhou; OCAT, Shanghai; and group presentations at UCCA, Beijing; The G Museum, Nanjing; and the Minsheng Museum, Beijing among others. Lin’s Sky Paintings are also in the collection of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and will be presented in the museum’s re-opening exhibition.
