ARTBBS 2026 Feature: Counterclockwise
Lin Ke: In 2009
If you could turn back time to any year, which moment would you choose to stop at?
The nostalgia permeating contemporary culture is no longer just a look back at the past. It has become a constantly refreshed and orchestrated emotion. What we miss may not be a life that once actually existed, but rather those moments that once pointed toward the future: the instant we first connected to the internet, the first projection of ourselves into the virtual world, the collective imagination of a life yet to come.
Around the turn of the millennium, the internet was both an entrance and an exit. Chat rooms, BBS forums, blogs, and download sites constituted an early form of digital experience: people switched identities within them, while also redefining the boundaries of reality. Back then, the virtual and the real were not clearly separated; they were more like two realities that permeated and continuously tested each other. The "future" carried a clear direction—faster connections, freer expression, a more open world.
More than two decades later, as the internet has shifted from a tool to an environment, and as social media, platform mechanisms, and algorithmic structures have become the fabric of everyday life, looking back at that period reveals not just memories themselves, but a series of prophecies that remain unfinished—or have already gone off course. The problematics of "post-internet art" have gradually come into focus. Art is no longer about developing a formal language on the internet, nor is the computer simply a technical tool to be deployed. Instead, art begins to grapple with a reality fully enveloped by platforms, data, and algorithms. The production and circulation of images, the mechanisms of attention distribution, even individual experience itself—all are embedded within this system. It is precisely in this context that the boundary between the "real" and the "virtual" is continually rewritten and redefined. From the technological optimism of the early millennium to the illusion of connection, the rapid advances of artificial intelligence arrive like a high-refresh-rate screen—stimulating, yet accompanied by a lingering sense of visual fatigue. Time never seems to move in a straight line; it keeps circling back at certain junctures.
"Counterclockwise" is therefore an intentional act of revisiting: returning to specific years, to the earliest experiences of going online, to intuitive judgments about the relationship between the virtual and the real, and to those cultural phenomena and social events that left a lasting mark on individuals. We invited artists and practitioners to answer a series of questions, re-examining, within the coordinates of time, those imaginings that have persisted to the present day, the prophecies that have veered off course, and perhaps also those unrealized things that are now unfolding in another form.
(Q-ArtBBS, A-Lin Ke)
Q: Choose a year to return to.
A: 2009.
Q: What did you do online back then? What are your memories of the internet at that time?
A: I had just graduated from art school. I spent a lot of time browsing art-related content online—it was a kind of self-education. There was this fascinating website called FFFFOUND! I could browse images that caught my interest and then jump from keyword to keyword: architecture, art, design, music, pop culture, even personal Tumblr blogs.
Years later, I met an American net-based media artist around my age. As we talked, we realized we were almost like artists from parallel universes—we had done many very similar art practices, but because our cultural backgrounds were different, they weren’t exactly the same.
When we talked, we mentioned FFFFOUND! To me, it felt like an online town square. People from all over the world wandered there. We couldn’t meet in person, but in some sense, we kept brushing past each other, even passing through each other’s bodies. That American artist had also started an art blog back in the day, and it turned out that blog had once been saved in my browser bookmarks too.
Q: How did you see the relationship between reality and the virtual world at that time? Did you feel a clear boundary between the two?
A: Back then, people didn’t really talk that way. No philosopher had yet condensed such abstract ideas into words I could hear. It was probably a few years later that I first heard that kind of framing from a teacher—someone who, in hindsight, was essentially teaching me about virtual reality, even if we didn’t call it that at the time.
Still, by 2010, I had already set up my "Virtual Studio." That meant using a laptop to create artwork.
Q: Back then, what did you imagine the future would be like?
A: I remember sitting in a classroom at the art academy in 2006, and the teacher showed us the world of *Second Life*. Everyone thought that the future of the internet would be some kind of 3D, game-like interface. But if we’re talking specifically about 2009—social media hadn’t really fully arrived yet, had it?
Q: Are there any cultural phenomena from back then that have continued to influence you to this day?
A: I think it’s the media art installation scenes from China’s art world in the 2000s, and also the installation views of exhibitions I saw online—like the exhibition photos on Contemporary Art Daily. Those visual experiences have continued to influence me to this day.
Maybe also the weird, fringe cultures of the internet—the worlds of oddballs and misfits.
Q: Which prophecies from back then have come true—or turned out to be completely wrong?
A: When I first started making work, I didn’t have a physical space, so I created a "Virtual Studio." I used 3D software to simulate real spaces, made installation pieces in them, and even sent those projects as PDFs to my senior, Zhang Liaoyuan. He commented at the time that I might become the best artist in China over the next ten years. That prophecy pretty much came true.
As for what went completely wrong—probably our assumption that the future of the internet would be like *Second Life*, a 3D virtual reality world. What actually arrived was social media.
Q: Now that 2026 has begun, what are your hopes for the future?
A: Honestly, I hope the future doesn’t turn out the way you described at the beginning of this feature.
In fact, the day before I received this interview request, I was driving and happened to be thinking about exactly that kind of abstract situation.
If reality really ends up like that, I at least hope I still have a bit of luck—to still be able to carve out some time to spend in front of a computer, in whatever gaps remain. Because so many things have already become work. Even answering this interview is work. I just hope the future still allows me to spend a lot of time on the computer, aimlessly exploring, the way I used to.
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Editor: ARTBBS Team
© 2026 ARTBBS
*Special thanks to BANK for their support with this interview.
