Comments on the Finalist

The exhibition comprises five video and photographic works, and explores the conversion and dialectic relationship between image making, encoding and sensorial logic. The artist contemplates on the subject of eternity through images and videos of natural landscape and cosmos, highlighting the indeterminacy, lack, blurriness and contradiction in images manipulated by software. Thus, he questions the various aspects between image and viewing as well as life and time. In this era inundated by images that almost determine individual sensory perceptions, return—Lin Guan-Ming Solo Exhibition, with a sentiment bordering on longing, emotively reflects on the imagination and ambiguity between image and personal, private memory.
(Commentator: SING Song-Yong)

Artwork Introduction

With the title of the exhibition, the artist aims to suggest how one bids farewell to the world in front of his eyes when pressing the camera shutter while having the image return to him simultaneously via the interface of the digital screen in this contemporary era. The rapid advancement of modern technology has given us the function of image editing, along with higher and higher pixel density. The moment an image is taken (away) from “the moment” that one sees in reality is the moment the image enters the digital world, where it becomes a compositional and formal element waiting for editing. The solo exhibition features five works, which all begin with the function of post-editing for images. When ordinary landscape images are applied with computer editing software, the images become dissociated from reality that people usually perceive. Through the exhibition, the artist not only provokes dialectic thinking about the image in the digital era, he has also presented lo-tech landscape of nature to continue his observation and exploration of “time.”

About the Artist

Lin Guan-Ming was born in Taipei in 1981, and received his MFA from the Graduate Institute of Arts and Technology, Taipei National University of the Arts. Lin has employed image as a medium to contemplate on and imagine about “time.” In a time when digital image technology has been evolving rapidly and the production of image has flooded society, Lin uses minimal image and its seemingly everlasting quality to dissolve image’s function as a vehicle of messages. By doing so, he is able to create layers of traces of time to foreground the fact that images are the visualization of memory and discuss image’s nature rooted in disappearance. Lin has shown his works in Taiwan, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Paris, Fukuoka and the US; and he was the recipient of the Taipei Art Awards in 2008.