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Installation view of “Lov-Lov Shop,” at de Sarthe Gallery, Hong Kong, 2019. All images courtesy the artist and de Sarthe Gallery.
Among today’s tech entrepreneurs, there is a widespread fundamental belief that things can be made better, easier, more convenient if consumers adopt the right pieces of technology. Hungry? Tap on your phone’s screen and a meal will come to you. Need a ride? Do the same. Swipe right at the suitable instant, and you may end up in happy matrimony.
In her latest body of work shown in Hong Kong’s de Sarthe Gallery, Lin Jingjing takes this notion to an extreme, wrapping it in technological fantasy and sleek commercialism to present “Lov-Lov Shop,” a project that lands viewers at the intersection of consumerism and technocapitalism, exploring the consequences of making available a manufactured perfect lover, friend, family member, or even political leader.
Installation view of LIN JINGJING’s You Need to Be Careful with Me: I Fall in Love and I Fall in Love Forever, 2019, six-channel video installation with color and sound: 8 min 26 sec, installation: 130 × 224 cm, at “Lov-Lov Shop,” de Sarthe Gallery, Hong Kong, 2019.
It was tech-driven romance that formed the bulk of the show and demanded most of our attention. In the gallery, “Lov-Lov Shop” began with a six-channel video, You Need to Be Careful with Me: I Fall in Love and I Fall in Love Forever (all works 2019), which splices together snippets of sad and saccharine moments from romcoms, animations, and TV shows, playing like an advertisement for a service that provides digital duplicates of any human in history, personality and other traits intact. The ad cautions that “life is too precious to waste it with the wrong person,” and promises nightly updates for the AI-powered lover to ensure maximum compatibility. It isn’t a far-fetched proposition. Already, Netflix shows us what we might like to watch, and Tinder tells us who we may want to date. Maybe, Lin postulates, our artificial lover could read us with even finer detail, appealing to all our basest needs.
“Lov-Lov Shop” continues with 18 images that are like posters or billboard ads that cut deep to solicit our fears of not attaining intimate companionship. Layered over what resemble stock portraits of suave, active, confident men and women, “ad” copy tells us that your AI lover is designed to deliver “the affection you deserve” and to “light up your soul like no one else.” But look closer and this quickly escalates: “She honors you in public.” “He wanted all his life to fall in love with you.” “She is your favorite addiction.” There are hints all over in “Lov-Lov Shop” that the product is more than a devoted paramour, one bordering on manic obsession.
On the flipside, Lin dreams up options to change how we love. In images with sharp, rich hues, the artist’s proposed enterprise guarantees pharmaceutically facilitated euphoria, with pills promising “unsurpassed joy,” a “goodbye [to] loneliness,” and “awaken[ed] divinity.” Other capsules are switches for our sexualities, letting us fall in love a thousand times over, with ourselves instead of someone else, or even with a tree.
There was a strong dystopian texture in “Lov-Lov Shop,” with the artist presenting a situation where humans actively choose ersatz companionship over the presence of another person. There’s a heavy dose of happy nihilism in Lin’s latest body of work, and the artist taps into a fundamental truth: we often don’t care how something works, only that it does. As repulsive as the “solution” may initially appear to its detractors—or as awkward as it may be for the prospective consumer to admit to needing such a product—the enticing core of “Lov-Lov Shop” as a speculative enterprise is its uncritical affirmation that you are important. As art, Lin’s investigations of unhappiness, egocentrism, and technocapitalism lead to deeper questions about humanity’s place when something of our creation looks back at us, trying to make sense of what we have become.
The exhibition concludes with a neon light installation, The Human Element and Why We Don’t Need It, which the artist posits as a book authored by AI. If data is fed in and art comes out, not apathetically but wholly within an emotional vacuum, devoid of intention and context, is its potential to move us undermined? Likely not. But after the pills wear off and our gadgets shut down, the hangover whelms, and it hits hard when we realize that we were in love with someone—or something—that could never truly love us back.
Brady Ng is ArtAsiaPacific’s Guangzhou desk editor.
Lin Jingjing’s “Lov-Lov Shop” is on view at de Sarthe Gallery, Hong Kong, until July 6, 2019.
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