Lin Ke: I'm Just Cosplaying a Painter

Lin Ke: I'm Just Cosplaying a Painter

Words & Interview / Leo

Originally Published on Hi Art

The first time I encountered Lin Ke’s work was in UCCA’s 2020 group exhibition Immaterial / Re-material. He was one of the earliest contemporary artists I took notice of. At the time, his work struck me as somewhat elusive, even difficult to enter immediately, yet somehow irresistibly compelling.

Before we met, I had imagined Lin Ke as a distinctly “technical” kind of artist: calm, precise, fluent in systems, someone able to move freely within the language of machines, living on the border between the virtual and the real. And yet last year, he presented an exhibition titled Hard Copy.

Screens Have Completely Taken Over Lin Ke’s Life

So I jokingly asked ChatGPT, “Is Lin Ke actually real?”

GPT paused, switched into “thinking mode,” and thought for a long time before finally replying: “Sorry, it seems I don’t actually know whether Lin Ke is real.” Fair enough. Since it didn’t know, and I wasn’t so sure either, I suddenly realized it was time to conduct a “real” interview with Lin Ke.

In the spring of 2025, Lin Ke held two solo exhibitions simultaneously in Shenzhen and Shanghai: *** and Ghostivity. Once the projects were completed, the exhibitions opened, and the heat of the openings gradually subsided, he quickly entered a kind of nearly weightless interval. For artists, exhibitions are often both a phase of concentrated focus and an intense release of energy; and when that endpoint truly arrives, everything that had previously been organized and pushed to the foreground can suddenly loosen and disperse within a short time.

This is how Lin Ke describes what he had lost: play.

What this word points to is not merely a certain rhythm within artistic production, but an inner driving force that makes creation possible in the first place, a kind of initiative not yet turned into task. There is no question that the production mechanism of contemporary art depends on clearly defined stages: proposal, production, installation, opening, dissemination, wrap-up. Within this series of legible nodes, the artist’s work is efficiently organized. Yet at the same time, the state closest to “play” is often the first thing to be exhausted. After the exhibitions ended, Lin Ke slid almost naturally into a familiar kind of inertia. And then, in an instant, screens completely took over his life.

As an artist who has worked for a long time with computer-generated imagery, Lin Ke is especially alert to the condition in which “work means a display screen, and rest still means staring at a phone screen.” His weariness is less a fatigue with technology itself than a kind of confrontation with the perceptual structure of contemporary society. When individual attention is continually handed over to refreshes and pushes, time quietly loses its fine-grained, tangible texture.

In this hesitation, painting re-entered Lin Ke’s life. But this did not mean a clear return to tradition so much as a recalibration of his own sensory life. Through the movement of the hand, the resistance of materials, and the act of letting his gaze rest on paper, he drew himself back from the floating condition of screen-based perception into a more palpable present. Rather than an intentional turn in his practice, Lin Ke’s return to painting seemed more like a belated form of self-repair.

Gazing and Chance

When speaking about his earlier ways of working with digital images, Lin Ke does not understand them simply as a technical choice. He uses two words to describe his state before the screen: “gazing” and “chance.”

By chance, he means a moment in which, before a work has even been completed, the result seems somehow already visible in advance: the artist catches hold of a possibility and fixes it precisely, allowing it to become the beginning of a work in that instant. Gazing, by contrast, is a more prolonged and sustained form of looking: for long stretches of time, he faces the world on the screen, suspended between daydreaming and thinking, allowing certain images to keep emerging and diffusing before his eyes, as if slowly surfacing from the depths of vision. It is a kind of work that happens in the mind, yet through the tools of the computer he is able to register that mental activity on a flat surface.

This long practice of gazing led Lin Ke to think of the concept of the “technical image.” When computers first appeared in the 1980s, people were acutely sensitive to the difference between technologically generated images and traditional images. When Lin Ke read those passages, he realized how closely they matched his own experience: the mosaics and point-based structures on the screen are not merely visual noise, but part of a new visual mechanism, a new “regime of vision,” akin to what Paul Virilio proposed.

He even connected this to an experience he once had with quantum hypnosis: wearing special glasses and subjected to flashing LED stimuli, even with one’s eyes closed, one sees kaleidoscopic points of light appear through the eyelids. Astonishingly, the mind can then recombine those points into scenes that seem almost real. Though untouchable, they hover before one’s eyes like actual images. This led him to ask: what exactly is the relationship between these mosaic-like “dot patterns” and the world we see?

In last year’s project, the digital images that Lin Ke has long worked with were compressed until they became increasingly blurred, their transparency reduced to a minimum, so that figures hovered between disappearance and emergence. Once the image is no longer clear, the brain’s compensatory mechanism begins to operate. It actively generates, fills in, and allows viewers to “see” what was not originally distinct. The process is almost like a visually self-driven form of AI generation: a cluster of mosaic fragments becomes a moving image under sustained gaze, becomes a mirror, becomes a scene people assume is there.

Lin Ke realized that visual experience has in fact always worked this way: even when facing a blank wall, a person may see what they want to see. Just as Leonardo da Vinci once gazed at a mottled wall and saw scenes of war, the image is never merely something external; it is also continually generated within the consciousness of the viewer. What Lin Ke has long been concerned with in art is precisely how “beauty” is formed within this process of looking.

Rather Than Worship Classical Images, He Dismantles “Image Debris”

Lin Ke has long rented a basement studio in Shanghai. Once the lights are adjusted, he uses this small space to test the visual experience of his computer-based works, almost like a makeshift screening room. There he repeatedly checks the colors on the screen, the granularity of the pixels, and the ways images appear under different conditions of light. It is as if Lin Ke is carrying out the standard workflow of the age of technical images: the artist is not only making, but also collaborating with devices, parameters, and output logics.

And yet when speaking about his recent return to painting, Lin Ke does not believe that at any point in his career he ever truly departed from painting. In a certain sense, the mouse is simply an extended brush, a technological extension akin to a “Matisse-like brushstroke.” Pictoriality has continued in another form throughout his technologically inflected practice. At the same time, he has recently made a deliberate effort to return himself to a more traditional path of training: from Renaissance portraiture and religious icons to aristocratic portraiture, then onward to contemporary fashion photography and all kinds of image material, he has retraced these classical visual templates almost as if walking through them once again in person, physically experiencing these image traditions from art history.

But Lin Ke has no interest in venerating these images as classics. Instead, he breaks down what he calls “image debris,” constructing in his mind a vast, heterogeneous, yet continuous visual genealogy through which he begins once more a personal and almost devout passage.

At the level of actual process, this state is often extremely direct: Lin Ke holds an image on his phone in one hand as reference, and paints with the other. Allowing for a certain degree of “mis-handling” and contingency, he has come to realize that what truly matters to him in painting is not the reproduction of the image itself, but the observation of how consciousness operates. Much of the information in a painting often comes from fragments of everyday experience: a person glimpsed for a second longer than usual, a conversation never properly recorded, a facial proportion that felt slightly off. In the moment Lin Ke first encountered them, these things were not clearly processed by the artist’s cognitive system, yet they truly existed within blurred perception. In the act of painting, as consciousness begins to move with the image, these unnamed fragments of life re-emerge and take on a certain place within the picture.

Lin Ke understands this painting process as something close to a clinical experiment. For him, painting has never been a simple tool of expression. He is clearly more deeply and intricately bound to screen-based creation. Painting is instead a device through which Lin Ke observes how consciousness works. It is simply that this entire apparatus and inquiry unfolds inwardly. What the viewer can touch is only the occasional glimpse, between those blurred faces, of a fragment of Lin Ke’s mental operations.

There Should Really Be a Question Mark After Hard Copy

This exhibition of gouache works was titled Hard Copy. Many people, on seeing the phrase, instinctively take it to refer to the condition of a material, as though moving from the virtual to the physical, from the screen back to paper, would itself imply some return of “authenticity.” But Lin Ke’s understanding of Hard Copy is clearly not so straightforward.

On the contrary, throughout the interview Lin Ke repeatedly says that he himself does not know what “real” actually is.

And it is precisely because of this hesitation that the title matters. It does not attempt to define the real; rather, it re-exposes why “the real” has once again become a problem today.

The reason Hard Copy cannot be simply understood as a material truth is that the feeling of reality in contemporary experience no longer depends solely on physical touch. High-definition images, immersive sound, more natural filters, algorithms increasingly tailored to individual preferences — our judgments of what is “real” today are more and more built upon effects that have been optimized and technically orchestrated. Reality has not disappeared, but it appears with increasing frequency in the form of something that merely seems real.

For this reason, the question Lin Ke cares about is no longer whether the virtual is false. Once the sensation of the real can also be produced and distributed with precision, how are we to understand our visual experience again? How much agency do we still possess in the formation of experience itself? Or to put it another way: of those realities we feel, how much comes from our own judgment and dwell time, and how much is simply something smoothly delivered before our eyes?

In this sense, Hard Copy does not offer an answer so much as a sustained question. It does not simply place painting in opposition to digital media, nor does it naïvely try to prove authenticity through the mere fact that “there is pigment on paper.” Rather, it suggests that reality may never have been an inherent property of the object itself, but a relation determined by how experience is produced, and by whom.

Thus, the significance of Hard Copy in this exhibition lies not in what it confirms, but in how it deprives the supposedly self-evident “real” of its taken-for-granted certainty. Lin Ke extracts the term from everyday language and turns it once again into something that must be examined and doubted.