小杉画廊荣幸地宣布于2021年10月24日呈现中国青年艺术家刘林个展——《转瞬即是 A Moment or A Lifetime》。本次展览涵盖艺术家2021年最新创作的二十五组综合材料绘画，是艺术家近年来的首次机构个展，亦是其迄今为止新作最多的展览。

艺术家刘林成长于一个全球信息涌入的年代，西方的卡通片、电影及波普艺术给他留下了深刻的文化烙印。信息的不对等使大众对西方文化衍生出了一种与“源产地”相异质的戏剧化想象，这成为了他创作的核心。展览通过解读刘林的艺术创作，将图像符号援引到东西文化的交界点，并融入社会现象的普遍性，从而去捕捉那些幻想与真实的交响。

展览以艺术家创作中的三个重要题材——“新闻、天使和夏日爱情“为线索，通过漫画式的结构和暗藏的讽喻形式，构成了一个突兀却又和谐的场域。特殊的立体材料突破了扁平化的审美与思维，传递出多种强烈情感迸发的美学信息，为观者提供了一种似是而非的暧昧场景影射；在静帧定格的转瞬间，邀请观者拓宽对当下生活的存疑，以此忖量爱、宗教及大众文化。

天使、牛仔的角色与沙滩、落日的场景似曾相识却又似乎陌生，线性概括与叙事背景重组，使作品不陷于抽象的非此即彼，而是保持于具体的日常之中。轻松幽默的作品拥有一种规避观点攻击性的天赋，观者从严肃的语境和过剩的信息中得以解放，步入一个充满荒诞美学的自由想象空间。

艺术家创作中颠覆预期的转折，是对图形和文字信息的反常处理，使严肃的社会议题与独帧的漫画偶合，在趣味的另一端埋藏了一份奇离。单一场景并不代表完结，而是在展览中组合成一个开放的时空，一种“转瞬即是”的关系在此生长——即刻与永恒和谐共振、相互转化。

本次展览探索艺术家对“转瞬即是”的笃定和迷人臆想，与观者共同步入一种分析哲学式的艺术遐思：当艺术消除了时间性，一刻与一生或变得别无二致，或许那些转瞬的时间，即是确实而长久的本质。
Fir Gallery is pleased to present A Moment or A Lifetime, a solo exhibition by young Chinese artist Liu Lin from October 24, to November 28, 2021. This exhibition is the artist Liu Lin ‘s most comprehensive one to date and his first institutional solo show in 2021, including his 25 groups of paintings made from mixed materials on canvas.

Living as a child and a teenager in a time when information influx was rampant across the globe, Liu Lin was shaped by a cultural tornado that brought him cartoons, films and the pop art from the west. Due to asymmetrical information, a dramatic imagination of western culture that differed from the original one was derived from the general public in China. That imagination becomes the core of Liu’s artworks. By interpreting his art creations, the exhibition borrows graphic symbols at where eastern and western cultures meet and incorporates pervasive social issues so as to capture the chemistry between fantasy and reality.
The exhibition is centered around three major themes from Liu’s creations – “news, angels and summer love”, giving a sense of being paradoxical yet harmonious through comic-style structures and hidden innuendos. The unique 3D materials have jumped out of the traditional flat design thinking and sparked a mixture of strong emotions, mapping a plausible and ambiguous scenario for the audience. At the instant moment when the static images freeze, the audience is involved in deepening their doubts about life and to ruminating on love, religion and pop culture.

Characters like angels and cowboys together with scenes like sand beaches and sunsets render a sense of familiarity and strangeness. Linear condensation and narration reorganization are what keep Liu’s art pieces out of the abstract black-or-white thinking and instead rooted in specific daily routines. These amusing and light-hearted paintings are inherently away from aggressive opinions, thus liberating the audience from serious narratives and redundant information and bringing them into a free space of fantasy which is full of absurdities in an aesthetics sense.

Liu Lin’s art practices take an unexpected twist when he bizarrely processes images and texts, which enable to couple serious social issues with single-frame comics and hide a taste of oddity on the opposite side of amusement. Single-frame settings are not the end of the story. When combined, they constitute an open space-time continuum that spawns a dynamic between a moment and a lifetime, that is, an instant moment resonates with a lifetime and the two always convert to one another.

The exhibition explores Liu Lin’s strong faith in “a moment or a lifetime” and his fantasy rooted in it, inspiring the audience to think from the perspective of analytical philosophy in the art reverie: when art eliminates its time attribute, a moment is no difference from a lifetime. Perhaps every single moment is the exact essence that lasts long.