Lin Ke: Hard Copy
What is "Real"? Lin Ke has long explored, through his artistic practice, how images are seen and how they come into being. From performance video works to the Sky Paintings series, he has continuously experimented with different modes of image production and spectatorship. The Gouache Portraits presented in this exhibition are an experiment in capturing sudden, fleeting subconscious images as they surface in his mind and sealing them onto paper. Like a concrete "Hard Copy,"each piece freezes a flash of insight into a material archive.
Unlike traditional portraiture, which relies on depicting a specific individual, the faces in Lin Ke's works are not drawn from any particular person. He often begins painting at the very instant inspiration strikes; the figures seem to leap forth from the depths of the subconscious, appearing as momentary visions. At times, multiple references merge into a single image-friends, advertising models, even everyday objects such as fruit-coexisting and blending within one face.
Why gouache? The medium plays a crucial role here. Compared to Lin Ke's more familiar digital painting, gouache is irreversible-each stroke is final, turning a liquid moment into a solid record. Its capacity for opacity and layering gives the images a compressed, textured quality that feels almost screen-like. In dialogue with digital processes, gouache helps lock these subconscious images into a gray zone between "likeness" and "unlikeness." The faces in the paintings carry no clear narrative; they are more like visual fragments suspended between appearance and disappearance.
For Lin Ke, "Gouache Portraits" is not merely a shift in medium, but an inquiry into how images take shape in the mind, how they are triggered by everyday visual experience, and how viewers in the exhibition space ultimately re-encounter them. This process brings private vision into a public context, inviting us all to gaze into that fundamental riddle: Is what we see truly "real"?
In the final step of "Hard Copy," we invite the audience to "tag" the portraits you like, or those in which you believe what appears is truly what is seen, by placing an emoji sticker in the designated area. Together, let us generate the final response to this inquiry into "the real."
