BANK is pleased to announce the opening of “Like Me”, the gallery’s first solo show of Beijing-based artist, Lin Ke. This exhibition continues the artists’ long-term interest in the behavioral science of our computer age by turning himself into his own guinea pig. Having converted his laptop into a studio, Lin mines the mundane actions of software operations and Internet surfing as the fodder and form of his art.
As we increasingly experience life mediated by computing devices, Lin Ke helps define the boundaries of a growing reality gap. In ”Like Me” the narcissistic economy of social media [Please like me!] is conflated with the convention of self-portraiture [like me] in attempt to articulate the role of human beings at the dawn of the digital era [Like us all!]. The exhibition becomes its own subject in a series of hypothetical installation images or Previews whereby the artist replaces downloaded gallery installation photos with his own artworks, or simply employs them as larger than life desktop images. In the video installation from which the exhibition takes its title, the artist raps dialogue appropriated from a 1960’s Star Trek episode that alludes to humans [of the technological future] in a state of dire complacency, caught in a trap of their own making, merely “…zoo samples, like me.”
In “Like Me” the real and virtual are flattened onto each other approximating the labyrinth of cyber technology. It is both a reflection of inter-subjectivity and spectator culture today as well as a prophecy of things to come where questions of authenticity and profundity, in the realm of online participation, may one day no longer be relevant.
