Lianjiang Zhu
- All Images © Lianjiang Zhu
At the Origin Lies the Likeness (2025)
Object-based installation, UV print on tinted acrylic panels
52.8 x 52.8 cm, Consisting of 9 acrylic panels (each 17.6 × 17.6 × 2 cm)
The portrait in At the Origin Lies the Likeness derives from the first digital image produced using a scanning technique by Russell Kirsch in 1957—a photograph of his son, Walden.
Through a process of UV layer-by-layer transfer onto tinted acrylic, this image—once confined to a screen—is re-materialised, multiplied and stratified, allowing the viewer’s gaze to drift and suspend between transparency and refraction.
The work reflects on the dual nature of the digital image: it is at once an intimate trace of memory and a “technical image” shaped, encoded and translated by the logics of technology. Through the interplay between the visual and the material, the piece foregrounds the subtle and complex entanglement between lived reality and its technical reproduction.
Object-based installation, UV print on tinted acrylic panels
52.8 x 52.8 cm, Consisting of 9 acrylic panels (each 17.6 × 17.6 × 2 cm)
The portrait in At the Origin Lies the Likeness derives from the first digital image produced using a scanning technique by Russell Kirsch in 1957—a photograph of his son, Walden.
Through a process of UV layer-by-layer transfer onto tinted acrylic, this image—once confined to a screen—is re-materialised, multiplied and stratified, allowing the viewer’s gaze to drift and suspend between transparency and refraction.
The work reflects on the dual nature of the digital image: it is at once an intimate trace of memory and a “technical image” shaped, encoded and translated by the logics of technology. Through the interplay between the visual and the material, the piece foregrounds the subtle and complex entanglement between lived reality and its technical reproduction.