Everything is Unreal Until It’s Not consists of a series of videos, works on canvas, and a piercing semi-organic installation. Through a stark contrast between idyllic and unsettling imagery, the work initiates a dialogue on the comforts and catastrophes of the technological era. The presented artworks not only speculate on the authenticity of a virtual mirage, but also allude to the intricate illusions of reality. As the title suggests, everything is unreal until it is not.

Lov-Lov is a fictitious artist identity developed by Lin Jingjing, as an unrestricted amorphous vessel of artistic 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, and ethnicity. Lov-Lov aims to be a mimesis of consciousness. Adopting the transhumanist capabilities enabled by contemporary technology, it seeks to peek 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 pervasive influence of technology, every aspect of living is rendered sweeter, brighter, and more palatable. Everyone and everything appear more beautiful when experienced through carefully manipulated systems designed to please, comfort, and persuade. Lov-Lov asks: Is this the new reality? Is this what humanity, as a collective, has tacitly subscribed to believe?

Lov-Lov’s video works present a world shaped by these conditions. Within the videos, humanoids with flawless features and perfectly symmetrical faces appear one after another in continuous montage. Less than sixty seconds a pop, adhering to today’s rule of thumb for consuming media, each clip comprises an ambiguous sermon, preaching a vaguely familiar truth. The faces, toying with the effect of the “Uncanny Valley,” are hauntingly seductive yet inexplicably alarming.

The imagery of each video was crafted using contemporary software and AI, while the scripts were composed by mimicking AI generative methods through a blend of varied existing materials. Targeting human irrationality and emotion, the texts are guided by rhetoric, unfolding almost like love songs. Equivocal yet evocative, the videos are reminiscent of artificial sweeteners. Lov-Lov raises another question: If the taste is sweet, do we still need to care about the ingredients? In a world saturated with illusion, if an empirical narrative is convincing, does rational discourse still retain any significance?

An extension of the video works, Lov-Lov’s paintings portray familiar yet dreamlike artificial environments. Between strangely scaled architecture and polyhedral trees, solitary figures wander casually as if digital avatars navigating a virtual landscape. Offering an alternative landscape to real life, the artworks speak to the evolving tendency toward technological escapism, where virtual worlds have become not only temporary refuges, but immersive oases increasingly embraced as part of reality itself. From personal devices to urban landscapes, there is seemingly a simulated reality masked over everyday life, a candy-coating that thickens with every digitally enhanced image and every carefully calculated stream of information. Yet when desires for control are repackaged as comforting promises, when fears of the unknown are distracted by illusion, and when the blue pill of hope and indulgence remains within reach, why would we not willingly accept it? After all, everything is unreal until our will accepts it as real.

However, certain historical events inevitably arrive to shatter the mirages in which we place our faith. Lov-Lov’s installation responds to the consequences of prolonged life within illusion. In sharp contrast to the videos and paintings, the installation artwork Everything is Unreal Until It’s Not (2024) presents a mirror quietly positioned at the center of the space. Suspended above it are thorn-covered vines that appear to grow from knife handles, extending outward like a spreading nightmare.

As if a scene from a classic fairytale, the installation conveys a certain banality in its representation of harm and hostility, reflecting our disbelief in the possibility of total catastrophe. In an age where idealism is continually reaffirmed, traumatic events such as war and large-scale disease often register as fiction within our subconscious minds. As catastrophe occurs, we observe from a distance through filtered information, allowing the illusion to remain intact. Only when misfortune occupies and replaces the screens through which we view reality, forcing direct confrontation with adversity, do we finally see—and exclaim:

“Wow, this doesn’t feel real.”

Inconvenience

Ruja Ignatova is a highly dramatic real-life figure, known as the “Cryptoqueen.” She holds a Ph.D. in Private International Law, studied at the University of Konstanz in Germany and the University of Oxford, and previously worked at McKinsey. She founded the so-called cryptocurrency OneCoin, which was in fact a global Ponzi scheme involving billions of dollars. Through carefully crafted speeches and rhetoric, she convinced large numbers of investors that they were participating in a “financial revolution of the future” and would quickly reap substantial profits. In 2017, Ruja suddenly disappeared and has remained missing ever since. She is currently listed as a wanted fugitive by the FBI.

In Ruja’s Fantasy Was Everyone’s Fantasy, Lin uses footage from one of Ruja Ignatova’s public speeches, retaining the original audio while replacing the subtitles with entirely different text. The subtitles no longer serve the function of translation or communication, but instead become an intervention into the mechanisms of language. The originally confident and persuasive speech is continuously dismantled and reconstructed by another narrative. As voice and text diverge from one another, the gap between reality and performance, promise and desire, is exposed.

A scam succeeds not only because someone creates a fantasy, but because that fantasy responds to desires that already exist. The promises of wealth, success, security, and a better future lead people to participate willingly in the production of the fantasy. The victims are also participants. The fantasy is no longer something imposed upon people, but something collectively created and sustained.

Fantasy is not the opposite of reality; it is often part of reality itself. People create narratives, believe in narratives, spread narratives, and ultimately come to live within them together.

The 6-channel video You Need To Be Careful With Me: I Fall In Love And I Fall In Love Forever (2019) simulates an engaging commercial television advertisement. Using appropriated footage and images from movies and the internet in combination with dynamic commercial language, the artist introduces the audience to an all-new AI lover. While the video resembles a public service announcement, the world it presents appears dystopian. The seemingly affectionate title is suggestive of a double entendre as the word “forever” may be implying non-human. In Lov-Lov’s world, consumers can freely download the appearance, voice, behavior, memory, wisdom, and even humor of any human in history, such that they may maximize their happiness and satisfaction.

The five-sided cubic projection work New Dawn for America presents a campaign speech delivered by a fictional artificial-intelligence presidential candidate. Speaking directly to the audience in the first person, the candidate addresses some of the most sensitive and controversial issues facing contemporary society, including social division, economic inequality, racial tensions, and environmental crisis. Throughout the speech, it demonstrates a level of rationality, efficiency, and judgment that appears to surpass that of any human political figure.

Within the future narrative constructed by the work, this artificial-intelligence candidate possesses not only superior capacities for information processing and decision-making, but is also free from self-interest, emotional instability, health concerns, and personal scandals. It appears capable of overcoming many of the limitations that have long confronted human politics, while representing the interests and will of the majority with unprecedented accuracy.

The American democratic system exists not because human beings always make the correct decisions, but because people possess the right to participate in making those decisions. Yet when an intelligent system is believed to be more rational, more objective, and more efficient than human beings, will people still be willing to assume responsibility for choice? If algorithms can replace judgment, what does democracy mean?

The work reveals a tendency that is already emerging: when technology is perceived as more reliable than human beings, people begin to voluntarily relinquish forms of judgment and responsibility that once belonged to them.

New Dawn for America extends the discussion of substitution into the political sphere. If intelligent companions replace intimate relationships, then an artificial-intelligence president replaces judgment, responsibility, and public participation itself. Are human beings expanding their capabilities, or gradually surrendering forms of control and power that were once considered fundamentally human? The efficiency and convenience promised by technology may lead people to overlook deeper questions concerning freedom, responsibility, and the collective future.

In the Rose Rose video work, the act of a needle piercing fresh rose petals is dramatically slowed down. What would normally be an instantaneous moment of puncturing and stitching is extended into a gradual and unavoidable process.

Through the use of close-up imagery, the relationship between rupture, stitching, and pain is continuously magnified. The viewer is not simply watching an action unfold, but is compelled to remain within the process of repair itself.