Endless War 1: Portal, 2026, Oil on Panel, 30 x 30 cm
Social media has become an important platform for the experience and dissemination of art, yet it is essentially driven by the attention economy. On social media, viewing is often compressed into a fleeting glance: fast, distracted, and constantly interrupted by new content. What I am concerned with is whether painting, in such an environment, can avoid being consumed as “just another image,” and instead still produce a sense of time and a sustained experience of looking.
The QR Code Painting here is both an image object and a threshold device. QR-code pixels that are drawn manually, point by point, maintain a precision and effectiveness sufficient to be recognised by a machine, while inevitably presenting subtle frayed edges and traces of brushwork—thereby indicating the creator’s living labour. When encountering it for the first time, viewers often take it as standardised digital pixels; yet the irregular edges of these pixel dots, and the hand-drawing errors exposed by the fine fraying, immediately pull viewers back into the time-site of my making. The traces of brushwork lead viewers to realise that this image can be recognised both as a precise product of digital devices and as something bearing the singular imprint of manual action. Achieving instrument-level precision through the intervention of the hand triggers viewers’ temporal awareness—they are able to sense the time and energy consumed in producing QR-code pixels through control, accuracy, and patience.
Notably, these QR codes are also passages to another temporality—they point, as entrances to social media, toward an online environment that is fast, instant, and emphasises the “here and now.” Therefore, QR Code Painting becomes an aggregative entry point: it integrates, within a single image, channels that lead both offline and online. Offline, it indexes the accumulated, embodied duration of my making process; online, it leads to a media space governed by the logic of speed and refresh. Along the online route activated by the QR code, viewers ultimately enter an orchestrated, time-rich “sticky painting system.”
Drawing on Mieke Bal’s concept of the “sticky image,” I develop a “sticky painting system” that operates within the social-media feed. It consists of two kinds of mechanisms: attraction tools and time tools. Attraction tools borrow visual and textual strategies from online image culture—such as the disgusting aesthetics of chumbox, clickbait text strategies, and other feed-native tactics—so that the work first gains attention within the scrolling interface; subsequently, time tools convert captured attention into extended engagement and richer experience.
On the level of time (taking the War Series as an example), I use war as a content thread: the persistence of war runs through human history, and contemporary war continues to produce catastrophic consequences. The work triggers a mild embodied simulation through touch interaction on the phone screen: the viewer’s pinch-to-zoom gesture corresponds to a diagrammatic image of an “opening wound,” so that looking is not merely a visual judgement but becomes a form of participation with bodily sensation. The second half of the system is composed of eight images stamped with dates of key battles in the history of human warfare; as “time indexing,” they trigger viewers’ access to collective memory about war, connecting the present moment of viewing to related wartime times in memory.
I hope to generate another, richer temporal experience within a social-media space governed by the logic of speed and refresh. The QR Code Painting is both an image object and a threshold into the online “sticky painting system”: when viewers raise their phone and aim it at the QR code, they are brought into a special space of looking that demands lingering.