Lin Ke

Jet Folder & Data Tree

Jet Folder & Data Tree by Lin Ke offers a humorous take on how computer and screen-based technologies affect our relationship to the natural world. In a statement through his gallery, Gallery Yang, Lin remarks that “one day in 2010, I discovered that the folders in my computer began talking to me. So I created lots of empty folders with no content but name.” Lin’s print, by extension, functions as a collage in which screen-based media becomes part of the natural world, and vice versa. By superimposing computer icons over “real” objects like airplanes or leaves in his photographs, Lin parodies familiar assumptions that photographs document the real world by revealing the relative ease of manipulating the medium. At the same time, he also suggests that our increasing reliance on screen-based technologies affects our perception and relationship to the natural world. In Lin’s rendering, we can only see the natural world through the layer of a computer-based intervention, suggesting a much more trenchant divide between false and physical realities.