BANK is happy to announce, artist Lin Ke's participation in Zhejiang Art Museum's academic research project "Nanshan 138: Zhejiang". This is a Contemporary Art Promotion Project for young artists. The project takes new city landmarks and perspectives as its starting point and focuses on the ecology of contemporary art development in Zhejiang as well as the broader diversified society. Young artists in Zhejiang thinks deeply about social reality and cultural innovation in the context of encouraging young artists. Lin Ke's "The Boundary of Dimensions" the second solo exhibition of "Nanshan 138" will officially open on July, 9. The exhibition will feature installations, sound works, computer painting and video. Through varying series of works, the exhibition switches between plane and space in a multi-dimensional way, thus creating a sound paradigm of nature and electronics. The artist's unique light-hearted creative expressions and his immersive, low-fi virtual space are like healing powers that defuse tensions and bring warmth to the audience.
Lin Ke moved from Beijing back down south at the beginning of 2018 to begin anew in this humid land. If Lin Ke's move is traced on an e-map at a scale of 1:1000 meters, he has only moved 120 units. The e-map measures the distance of the artist's travel just as a pointer finger might scribe a journey around one's multi-windowed tablet, with each click representing a hundred kilometres. And just as Lin's repositioning started in 2013, when he left Hangzhou for Beijing, his artworks are also the result of a long elliptic journey of analysis, conversion and re-production. Presented here is a selection of Lin's eclectic productivity over the past 7 years that delineate his physical trajectory in tandem with his creative output.
As virtual space encroaches steadily upon the dominance of our physical experiences, Lin looks to nature as a conduit to bridge this dichotomy. Upon entering the exhibition, a "tree" sits high upon a peak that can only be reached by synthetic rock-climbing stones. Referencing classical Chinese landscape painting, with its flattening of space and iconic mountain peak where literati might meditate, the tree installation becomes a symbol for both spiritual transcendence and the semiotic conundrum so pertinent to our augmented age. The tree, once a tree, then a photo, then a file, then an icon, then a sculpture is a threshold for the passing of nature into binary code and back again. From God's POV on this perch high on the exhibition wall the artist's inquisitive face peers beyond the tree like a sage in the wilderness looking for the parameters of human consciousness. But if this consciousness, like digital space, is potentially infinite, where might meaning lie? Along its ambiguous edges or within?
Using the architecture of computer systems, software, and the attendant network as his canvas Lin makes ontological inquiries into the malleability of his chosen mediums and their presentations. Lin's endeavor to wrap digital parameters around material substance is similar to language where context often nuances meaning. The computer mouse for Lin "becomes a mole" to "link binary planes to three dimensions". Figurative and direct experiences are often conflated in this schizophrenic dominion. It is a game of cat and mouse where loopholes arise as quickly as they disappear.
In this expanded environment Lin articulates some of the ambiguities and possibilities for a virtual reality that we have already begun to live. In the early work Stargate, 2013 Lin lassoes constellations from desktop images using the rudimentary tools of Photoshop and proceeds to drag them off the confines of the screen as if exiting a stage. Equating the screen with the universe sets the tone for an exhibition in which perspective and ascension is paramount. Just like the first human in space witnessing earth as a beautiful blue sphere, the digital realm has also changed concepts of scalability and dimensions with simple binary code. The digital space not only allows but encourages multiple, synchronous tasks being performed in unison. Hence, the seeming disarray of artworks, some approximating post-notes or tiled and tiered windows, emphasize the artist's crusade to manifest the all-over, multi-dimensional composition of a world we navigate on average, 11 hours per day… and counting.
As virtual space encroaches steadily upon the dominance of our physical experiences, Lin looks to nature as a conduit to bridge this dichotomy. Upon entering the exhibition, a "tree" sits high upon a peak that can only be reached by synthetic rock-climbing stones. Referencing classical Chinese landscape painting, with its flattening of space and iconic mountain peak where literati might meditate, the tree installation becomes a symbol for both spiritual transcendence and the semiotic conundrum so pertinent to our augmented age. The tree, once a tree, then a photo, then a file, then an icon, then a sculpture is a threshold for the passing of nature into binary code and back again. From God's POV on this perch high on the exhibition wall the artist's inquisitive face peers beyond the tree like a sage in the wilderness looking for the parameters of human consciousness. But if this consciousness, like digital space, is potentially infinite, where might meaning lie? Along its ambiguous edges or within?