"The Land of Nowhere": Lin Hung-Hsin Metaphysics of Contemporary Painting and the Reconstruction of Viewing

by Professor Chen, Chih-Cheng, President of National Taiwan University of Arts (NTUA)

Introduction

In the age of algorithmic vision and the saturation of digital imagery, painting confronts a renewed ontological question: how can it remain a site of perception, contemplation, and resistance within a world dominated by data and simulation? Lin Hung-hsin’s artistic practice offers a profound response to this question through what may be called a digital archaeology—a method of returning to the origins of the image by excavating its material, temporal, and perceptual depths. His works inhabit the interstices between technology and metaphysics, between the visible and the invisible, constructing a poetic dialectic in which the act of painting itself becomes both a critical reflection and a meditative gesture.
Rooted in the Daoist notion of wu-he-you (無何有) — “being from nothing” — Lin’s painting embodies an aesthetic of emptiness and potentiality. Against the overproduction of digital images, he reinterprets this local philosophical inheritance as an act of resistance: an aesthetics of slowness and silence in a hyper-visual world. His brushwork transforms digital residues—pixels, glitches, and scanning errors—into painterly language, reconfiguring the technological trace into a tactile and temporal gesture. This process reveals the possibility of what Walter Benjamin once called the aura—not as a return to the original, but as a reemergence within fracture, delay, and ambiguity.
Situated within the post-medium condition described by Rosalind Krauss, Lin’s work exemplifies an interfacial painting, a liminal field where technology, body, and thought converge. His practice resonates with the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, where the act of seeing is not one-directional but reciprocal—the viewer both gazes and is gazed upon, entering into a chiasmic relation with the painted world. Light and shadow in his paintings thus operate not as representational devices but as manifestations of becoming—what Deleuze might call a “time-in-motion,” a lived temporality that folds perception into material process.
Through this aesthetic of digital archaeology, Lin Hung-hsin’s art articulates a visual ethics of perception. His paintings offer an alternative mode of being-with-images—one that refuses the seamless surface of the digital and reclaims the sensorial density of duration, gesture, and materiality. Bridging Eastern metaphysics and Western media philosophy, Lin’s practice reopens painting as a site of ontological inquiry and as a critical mirror for our post-photographic condition.

Essay

“The Land of Nowhere”: Lin Hung-hsin’s Metaphysics and the Reconstruction of Seeing

“The Land of Nowhere” (Wu He You Zhi Xiang, 無何有之鄉) originates from Zhuangzi, Chapter: Free and Easy Wandering (Zhuangzi · Xiaoyaoyou). It describes a state of “emptiness awaiting things” (xu er dai wu), a field of potentiality where “nothing is absent” (wu suo bu you)—a realm of free, unconditioned existence.
Within Lin Hung-hsin’s painting practice, this philosophical lexicon of Zhuangzi is reawakened as both a challenge and a response to the visual orders and identity constructs of contemporary culture. This exhibition does not merely employ Eastern thought as a symbolic theme but instead takes Zhuangzi’s metaphysical speculation as a conceptual fulcrum, constructing an inquiry into painting as becoming.
In an age of image saturation and digitally constructed visual culture, Lin’s work raises a central question: beyond innovation, how might painting reopen the possibility of autonomous, self-aware perception?

1. The Genesis of Lin Hung-hsin’s Painting Practice

Lin Hung-hsin’s painting occupies a unique position in the discourse of contemporary art not merely because of the sophistication of his formal vocabulary or the recognizability of his style, but because he has consistently treated artmaking as a philosophical practice of seeing—a sustained inquiry into the question of how seeing itself is possible. This orientation recalls the perceptual tactility explored by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Le langage indirect et les voix du silence (Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence), which reveals both the corporeality and the intentionality of perception.
In his early works, Lin focused on the figural and representational aspects of people and landscapes. Yet these were not extensions of conventional portraiture; rather, they depicted anonymous beings eroded by the light and shadow of their time. The figures on his canvases are often silent and isolated, their forms dissolved by light within gray-scale backgrounds, revealing a liminal state of existence. Gradually, these figures came to resemble the mythic beings buried under historical ashes in Anselm Kiefer’s paintings, or the modern solitude found in Edward Hopper’s scenes. Lin avoided sentimental expression or redemptive emotion; instead, through his restrained color fields and transformed brushstrokes, he forged an ethics of seeing. As Walter Benjamin noted in his discussion of the aura, the value of art lies not in representation but in the luminous afterglow that shimmers between the act of seeing and the distance that sustains it.
After his engagement with the design field and exposure to the digital era, Lin’s painting underwent a fundamental transformation in its structure of vision. Once images became digitally computed, instantly transmitted, and hyper-mediated, human visual experience grew increasingly disciplined and objectified. As Jean Baudrillard observed, in the age of the hyperreal the image no longer reflects reality but replaces it with its simulacrum. Lin sensitively captured this condition and responded through pictorial form: within his canvases, shapes fracture and reform, faces are partially veiled or disintegrated, or they blur into zones of digital noise. The viewing subject is thus placed in a state of uncertainty. This indeterminacy becomes his potent response to the phenomenon of mediation.
In this sense, Lin’s works constitute a loop of seeing: the viewer gazes upon the painting, while the de-faced image gazes back, establishing a reflexive relationship between self and other. As Gilles Deleuze writes in Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque), the world’s image is no longer a flat plane but a movement that perpetually folds into itself. Lin’s pictorial spaces embody this visual fold—deconstructing the boundaries between foreground and background, subject and object—and transform painting into a formal meditation that echoes the act of perception itself. This space of being seen exposes the paradox of visual power: as the image is absorbed into systems of representation and transmission, authentic seeing turns inward, toward contemplative introspection.
During his mature period, Lin increasingly incorporated the qualities of digital imagery as a dialogical counterpart to painting. Employing 3-D scanning, image modification, and digital-glitch techniques, he generated new tensions between painting and technology. Such interventions displaced the painterly language and redefined authenticity within painting. Baudrillard’s remark that “the real is dead; only the flow of simulation remains” finds resonance here: Lin reconstructs the aura precisely at the intersection of simulation and materiality. The tactile textures of brushwork intermingle with pixel glitches, making painting itself a strategy of resistance against the hyperreal. He opposes the immediacy of the digital image with the deferment of painterly indeterminacy and counters algorithmic circulation through the resistance of matter. Lin’s reflection on the picture as such has given his work a new idiom—a language situated between manual labor and algorithm, between the material and the virtual. In this sense, his painting becomes a renewed proposition on the essence of painting in the post-image era.
In more recent works, Lin’s art has shifted toward simplicity and the aesthetics of Ametropic Space. Figurative realism gradually recedes, giving way to indeterminate forms, geometric structures, and the flux of light and air. This Ametropia is not a subtraction of form but, rather, a generative realm akin to Zhuangzi’s notion of Wu He You—the field of becoming. The fissures within his canvases are no longer signs of rupture but channels through which light enters, a state of “emptiness giving birth to brightness.” In this process, light and consciousness flow once again. Cracks and intervals are not mere formal breaks but conduits of thought—a silent language through which painting generates freedom within Wu He You. The viewer, in contemplation, experiences a resonance between the metaphysical and the physical. Such Wu He You corresponds to what Deleuze called a field of difference (champ de différence): not emptiness, but potentiality in perpetual generation.
When Lin allows his pictorial world to descend into a non-lieu—a placeless Wu He You—its spatial ambiguity and sense of distance open a metaphysical space that transcends locality. It becomes not only a space of seeing but also a space being seen—a visual intermediary zone poised between the metaphysical and the corporeal, existing at the edge of consciousness.
Lin Hung-hsin is not a utopian escapist. His Land of Nowhere is, in fact, a cold, impersonal response to contemporary reality—a visible Ametropia where image and likeness, reality and virtuality coexist in suspension. As Benjamin warned, “technical reproduction causes the aura to disappear but also inaugurates new modes of perception.” Lin’s painting reconstructs perception within the fissures of the residual aura. Through the brush, he answers the velocity of the age with stillness and resists noise with contemplation, restoring painting as a field for thought and perception.
In this creative context, Lin Hung-hsin’s painting practice represents not only a formal innovation but also an inquiry into the very possibility of contemporary painting. As digital imagery dominates sensory experience, his paintings remind us—through a position grounded in cultural identity and artistic integrity—that seeing remains an ethical act, a process continually generated between vision and perception, between materiality and immateriality. The Land of Nowhere is thus not a distant utopia but every moment of self-reflection; in the depths of seeing, a new era of painting is coming into being.

2. The “Fold of Becoming” — Syntax of Painting

The concept of Wu He You (“the land of nowhere”) in Lin Hung-hsin’s creative philosophy translates into a praxis of pictorial becoming. When one stands before his works in the immediacy of their presence, the images reveal themselves as deferring through disappearance, while light and form seep through the cracks. His painting is animated by a continual flux and generative motion. The disintegration and reassembly of images are not acts of destruction but movements of becoming—a folding process in which real images, digital noise, figurative bodies, and fictive spaces ceaselessly fold into one another, forming a pleat of differences.
This embodies what Gilles Deleuze describes as the essence of difference and becoming: existence is not grounded in fixed identity but in continuous transformation—“difference is being itself.” For Deleuze, becoming is the movement of difference, and the fold symbolizes the inner motion of the world, where perception and matter, soul and body, flow reciprocally. Lin’s paintings no longer follow conventional pictorial logic but open up such a field of multiple realities, where existence is no longer tied to substance but arises from the fluidity of perception.
The human figures under Lin’s brush often undergo a process of de-facing. The visage, in his rendering, ceases to be a marker of individual identity; rather, it participates in what Deleuze and Félix Guattari termed the deterritorialization of the face (déterritorialisation du visage) in A Thousand Plateaus (Mille Plateaux), where they argue that the face is a node within the social machine—a visual interface through which power disciplines the subject.
In Lin’s paintings, those “half-obscured and fragmented faces” do not represent personal loss but an act of deconstruction of the subject. By erasing the form of identity, he returns to the purity of perception. This is a strategy of dismantling the mechanisms of control that society imposes upon subjectivity, allowing seeing to return to the free play of sensation and perception.
Through this process of de-facing, the viewer no longer encounters a recognizable Other but instead perceives the latent Wu He You—a new mode of being generated amid ambiguity, separation, and fissure. Lin’s practice, as ever, continues to seek a place of dwelling within this state of indeterminate becoming.

3. The Disappearance and Rebirth of “Aura”

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin argues that technological reproduction leads to the disappearance of aura, depriving art of its unique connection to physical reality, time, and space—its singular hic et nunc (“here and now”). Lin Hung-hsin’s painting, however, attempts to reconstruct the possibility of aura amid the ruins of its modern disappearance. Contemporary images, no longer distinct or unrepeatable, have become visual noise. Yet through the manual labor of painting—the materiality of pigment and the gestural inscription of brushwork—Lin reclaims that “irreproducible moment.”
His brushstrokes are not repairs of the image but sedimentations of temporality; every layer of pigment, every ambiguous figuration, becomes a counter-movement against Benjamin’s lost here and now. Such an ethics of painting not only resists the erasure of authenticity by mechanical reproduction but also seeks a new depth of existence within the hyperreality of the digital age.
Lin’s paintings allow viewers to experience the rebirth of aura: though the imagery originates from technology and media, it regains a subtle radiance through the material trace of the brush. These works are not nostalgic recreations of modernity but, in Benjamin’s words, “flashes of historical fragments”—truth revealed through the shattered.

4. The Reconstruction of Seeing

Postwar thinkers of the Frankfurt School observed that industrial and technological development had transformed art in capitalist society into what Herbert Marcuse critiqued as a system of reproduction, transmission, massification, and commodification—leading to the “one-dimensionality” of both humans and culture. In this sense, a crisis of modernity emerged: the one-dimensionality of seeing.
Influenced by this critical position, Lin Hung-hsin’s Land of Nowhere aims to reconstruct an ethics of seeing. In today’s world, where audiovisual perception is enveloped by digital imagery and algorithmic mediation, vision no longer grants access to reality but becomes a conditioned, habituated experience. Lin’s compositions respond by both resisting and deconstructing this phenomenon—dismantling the collapsing structure of digital media through his painterly form.
His strategy of reconstruction manifests in multiple ways: fragmented faces that abandon identity alignment, folded spatial planes, decomposed images, and cyclical viewing loops that invite the observer into non-narrative seeing. This folded mode of perception transforms painting into what Deleuze calls a plane of immanence (plan d’immanence), where every layer of existence folds into another, and viewer, image, reality, and virtuality become inseparable.
Materiality, time, memory, and the digital intertwine as reciprocal folds of reality. The viewer’s gaze, caught within these folds, generates an ametropic (distorted yet illuminating) vision, reconstituting visibility and sensibility in the here and now. Thus, the act of viewing in Lin’s paintings can be regarded as an event of seeing—a generative process that unfolds between the materialized image and the singular consciousness of painting itself.

5. The Coordinates of the Anthropocene

The history of painting has always been a history of evolving modes of seeing. Since the Renaissance, painting has borne the task of representing reality, yet the development of photography and cinema in the nineteenth century fundamentally destabilized this representational system. With the rise of mechanical reproduction and technological innovation, painting’s role has shifted—from mimetic representation toward formal and conceptual thinking through form.
In Taiwan’s contemporary art field, attention has increasingly turned to what Jacques Rancière calls le partage du sensible—the “distribution of the sensible.” This interest was perhaps reinforced by Rancière’s own visit to Taiwan and the discussions it inspired. In the age of the Anthropocene, art marks a new human condition: the technological epoch that humans have created is no longer the center but one hybrid component among many. Humanity itself becomes a composite assemblage, a node within multiple intersecting systems. Individuals tend to abandon fixed identities, existing instead in states of fluid becoming, negotiating complex alliances between nature, technology, and non-human entities.
Within Lin Hung-hsin’s paintings, de-faced figures and fragmented silhouettes already suggest the decentering of the subject. The interrelations among human–machine–image increasingly define his conceptual coordinates. In the Anthropocene, society has entered what Baudrillard described in Simulacra and Simulation as a world of signs and images no longer referring to reality—an era where “simulation replaces the real.” Lin’s work exists in the narrow space between simulacrum and reality: his paintings appear image-like yet refuse to become images. Their unique formal presence reminds us that painting can still embody a resistance to the replacement of the real.
From an ethical perspective, Lin’s practice resonates with Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman ethics of becoming. Braidotti argues that posthuman ethics should not be a pessimistic anti-utopia but a generative, fluid relationship between technology and the flesh—a notion that echoes Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. The fissures and flows in Lin’s brushwork become metaphors for such generativity; they do not signify collapse but instead correspond to the interwoven networks of a hybrid age.
Contemporary Anthropocene art emphasizes the symbiotic relationship between human technological civilization and its material-technological environment. Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobjects helps illuminate Lin’s practice—his gray mists, cracks, and light-shadow structures are traces of a world co-created by human and technological forces. Through painting, Lin constructs a vessel for thought in which the Eastern metaphysical Wu He You and the Anthropocene’s principle of symbiosis converge.
Lin’s art positions itself at the threshold between the contemporary and the Anthropocene. His paintings preserve the aura of the medium while deeply internalizing the generative logic of digital imagery. This coexistence of contradiction makes him one of the rare post-medium painters in the Eastern context—working between pigment and pixel, seeking a perceptual order that transcends technique.
As Deleuze writes in The Fold, “The world is not composed of substances but of infinite folds and unfoldings.” Lin’s canvases visualize this very logic of folding: the fluidity of pigment, the dislocation of brushstrokes, and the blurring of space together constitute a multilayered field of becoming. His paintings no longer pursue stable forms but allow the image-in-becoming to become existence itself in motion.
This visual thinking extends to the Anthropocene dimension. As technology permeates phenomena and data replaces experience, humanity has become part of complex ecological and digital systems. Lin’s canvas acts as an interface that reconfigures relationships among human, technology, phenomenon, and data. Fragmentation is no longer destruction but a sign of coexistence.
The interlacing of brushstroke and pixel gives rise to an anthropotechnological symbiosis—an imagistic ecology in which the human merges with the machine. Lin’s paintings, as both products of technology and sanctuaries of human sensibility, offer a vision of hybrid coexistence: the final dwelling place of human perception in the posthuman era.

6. Digital Archaeology

Lin Hung-hsin’s painterly language is deeply rooted in the local philosophical notion of Wu He You—a generative field of potential, a metaphysical space of “being through nothingness.” In contemporary terms, Lin reinterprets this concept as an aesthetic gesture that resists the over-digitization of images. His paintings embody a meditative deceleration, offering a contemplative pause amid the anxiety of algorithmic overstimulation and image saturation in the digital era.
In a world where images are ubiquitous, painting faces the challenge of reaffirming its necessity. Lin approaches this by intervening in the generative structure of the image itself. He transforms technological residues—digital scans, AI glitches, pixel noise—into a vocabulary of brushwork. This is not imitation but a form of digital archaeology: through the organic labor of the hand, painting excavates the origins of the digital.
Amid the flood of reproducible images, Lin’s brushwork reconstructs aura. His canvases do not seek to restore the authority of an “original” but instead render process and temporality perceptible through fissure, delay, and ambiguity. From an art-historical perspective, his practice resonates with Rosalind Krauss’s concept of the post-medium condition, in which art no longer depends on a single medium but engages in self-reflexivity across intermedial interfaces. Lin’s work exemplifies such interfacial painting, where the canvas becomes a site of encounter among technology, the body, and thought.
This digital archaeology transforms painting into what Benjamin termed optical contemplation: a process that liberates perception from the inertia of digitalized (mechanically reproduced) reality. The viewer is both invited into and left within the painting—drawn into Lin’s Wu He You while remaining on the threshold of the digital world. This dual condition makes his paintings mediators between perception and reflection, proposing a digital archaeological model that participates in constructing new interpretive perspectives in the image-saturated age of mass media visual culture.

7. The Dialectics of Pictorial Form

Light and Shadow Composition

In Lin Hung-hsin’s pictorial structure, fields of color, brushwork, imagery, and voids interweave to form what might be called a field of potentiality. Pigment seeps and deforms across tonal borders—between wet and dry, thick and thin—producing subtle modulations that constitute a formal vocabulary of sensory dialectics. His intentional use of emptiness is not an absence but a generative energy field, resonating with the liubai (留白) or “reserved blank” in East Asian aesthetics—where light and shadow embody the void as an active quality.
If Lin’s art is a rhetoric of generative being, then light and shadow are its silent yet essential particles of speech. In his work, light is neither symbol nor mere physical phenomenon—it is existence in the process of becoming. Emerging not from the sky but from within the formal structure of the canvas, light in Lin’s paintings reveals an inner illumination—a realm of the formless made visible. The canvas becomes a membrane for breathing and reflection. The viewer, in turn, does not simply look but is looked at: enveloped by light, immersed in a reciprocal structure of perception.
This reciprocal seeing recalls Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the intertwining of the visible and the invisible, where vision is an embodied circuit between the seer and the seen. Lin’s painting thus transcends pictorial representation, transforming into a living temporality—a coexistence of emptiness, light, and time. The generation of light becomes not a physical event but a manifestation of temporal form—a visual thinking that is silent yet luminous.

Temporal Flux

Each painting in The Land of Nowhere oscillates between stillness and motion, transparency and density. Every brushmark in Lin’s work is a fold of time; each layer of pigment verifies the sedimentation of matter, and each gesture inscribes the duration of manual labor. This diachronic process does not aim at linear time but accumulative simultaneity—a temporal thickness embedded in pictorial space. Painting thus becomes the visualization of the thickness of time, a perceptible sediment of duration.
As Deleuze writes in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (L’Image-mouvement), the image is not static but a time-in-motion, a sensory field where perception and action converge. Lin’s paintings embody this notion: time flows not outside the image but within the pigment, folding into every tactile trace. His art turns temporality itself into a material presence—an ever-becoming rhythm of existence visible on the surface of the world.

Conclusion

Lin Hung-hsin’s painting constructs a unique thread of formal thought that bridges the classical and the contemporary, the void and technology. From Zhuangzi’s notion of “self-contentment without reliance” (無待而自得) to Benjamin’s idea of the disappearance of aura, and Deleuze’s fold of becoming, Lin transforms painting into an ontological site of being—where Eastern metaphysics and Western theory converge and resonate across the pictorial field.
Through long-term dialogue with the artist, it becomes evident that Lin’s practice also addresses the dialectic between locality and globality in contemporary Taiwanese art. He rejects the politically symbolic representation of “Taiwan” and instead conceptualizes the local as a mode of becoming. This “local becoming” echoes Bruno Latour’s Anthropocene assertion that “we have never been modern.” Lin’s paintings fold phenomena, time, and the human into a sympoietic entity—a co-creative body of perception and world.
Within his generative visual language, Lin challenges the inherited conception of painting as mimetic representation of the physical world. As Deleuze described the Body without Organs (corps sans organes)—a field of continuous transformation—Lin’s works, such as Swift Wind, Strong Grass and Silently Spitting Fire, embody this dynamic energy. The former, through digitally translatable forms of line, color, and brushwork, merges the tactile with the algorithmic; the latter distorts the figure into spectral residue, where flames shimmer as data glitches. These fractured images are simultaneously material and conceptual, technical and perceptual.
From Benjamin’s perspective, such visual fragmentation is a response to the loss of aura. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin asserts that reproducibility dissolves the authenticity and ritual of the artwork. Lin, however, reverses this process: he reconstructs aura on the cold surface of digital imagery, invoking once more the material warmth of painting. His brushstrokes are not mere gestures but deposits of temporal labor—organic traces of human rhythm. Through them, the compressed reality of algorithmic speed regains its Dasein, its depth of lived perception. Thus, aura no longer depends on an original but re-emerges within fissures, delayed pixels, and generative ambiguity.
As Deleuze repeatedly emphasizes, art does not represent the world—it creates sensations that stand upon the earth. Lin Hung-hsin’s painting exemplifies this generative mode of thinking: it allows the world of painting to be re-seen in the silent gaze of the viewer, and it restores painting, within the age of simulacra, as the manifestation of existence itself.
In sum, Lin’s work invites a renewed reflection on the relationship between seeing, being, and becoming. It is an ethical practice of perception—one that transcends anthropocentric aesthetics and opens onto a posthuman horizon of hybrid formation, where matter, image, and consciousness unfold together in a shared field of creation.

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