Lin Ke's Swimming, a commissioned work for G Museum in Nanjing, is the artist's largest and most ambitious Sky Painting made to date. Sky Paintings is a series that the artist produced as a response to the conundrum of how to paint in the age of digital technology. Here Lin has resurrected a discarded image file of a sea of swimmers as a mammoth mural that becomes an architectural intervention in the space of the G Museum. The original image file has been edited so that only the essential components remain, creating in the artist's mind a perfect painting. We see gleeful swimmers cavorting in an all over composition and ocean of checkered marks. In Photoshop the bottom layer is marked by a checkered pattern, signifying that no more pictorial information exists. Over the original image the artist as also painted lines to articulate some of the swimmers and their movements. The work blown up to scale is reminiscent of the ceilings of Roman cathedrals with angels flying above, except here the artist has used industrial materials and state of the art UV printing techniques. The angelic quality of the swimmers is even more pronounced by the G Museum's mammoth space and birds view of the city which the artwork both obscures and accentuates.
