Lov-Lov: Everything is Unreal Until It’s Not

EVENT DESCRIPTION

DE SARTHE is pleased to present Everything is Unreal Until It’s Not, a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Lov-Lov debuting a piercing, semi-organic installation as well as a new body of videos and works on canvas. Within the exhibition, the artist initiates a dialogue via a stark contrast of the idyllic and the unsettling. A study of comforts and catastrophes in the technological era, the presented artworks not only speculate the authenticity of a virtual mirage but allude to the intricate illusions of reality, where everything is unreal until it is not.

Lov-Lov is a fictitious artist identity invented by Lin Jingjing as an amorphous vessel of art creation. Inspired by the versatility and fluidity of artificial intelligence, Lov-Lov is a self-defined entity free of physical indicators and binary definitions such as age, gender, or ethnicity. An isolation of the transhumanist capabilities enabled by contemporary technology, Lov-Lov aims to be a noumenal mimesis of consciousness that peeks behind the veil of empirical reality.

In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), German philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed the doctrine of “transcendental idealism,” which suggests that all perceptions of objects and reality are not of the subjects themselves, but only the way they appear to us under the influence of our sensibilities. In other words, reality is but a phenomenon authenticated by subjective feeling. However, this notion has grown far more complex in the contemporary era. With the permeated aid of technology, every aspect of living is rendered a bit sweeter, brighter, and more palatable. Everyone and everything are more beautiful when experienced through the layered bias meticulously manipulated to please, comfort, and impress – and Lov-Lov asks, is this the new reality? Is this what we as a collective have subscribed to believe?