Tong Gallery+Projects is pleased to announce that it will launch Xu Liang's solo exhibition "What you see is what you get" in L SPACE, presenting the artist's paper pencil and canvas oil paintings. The exhibition will open on November 15, 2018 and last until December 23. 

What you see is what you get. 

Modern people who are extremely familiar with window visualisation enjoy a series of conveniences brought by vivid digital virtual images, but no matter how high the resolution is and how realistic it looks, there are still pixels behind it, and the computing system that makes it change, arrange and combine in an orderly manner. All this has not disappeared because we are not easy to distinguish it. The more complex and realistic the virtual image is, the larger the background running system that we can't see is. One day, the pixels may be as small as the atoms in the real world, and there is no way to identify it at all. The function with information is becoming more and more powerful, and even forming artificial intelligence. It's as if human beings have really become the strings of the creator playing genes. 

This is the way human beings have always understood the world - the abstract real world, which has not changed for tens of thousands of years and gradually formed civilisation. 

Draw a combination of lines and dots on the wall of the cave with stones of different colours. It has crossed ten thousand years and entered our eyes and still can still see that it is an injured bison. The Renaissance painting master is only more complex and high-definition. It is not easy to notice the points and lines used to construct illusions, but they are on their backs. The later operating mechanism is consistent. 

Under this logic, "painting" is like a bug in programming, and human beings seem to be born unable to avoid bugs. The error of 0.001 that can't be avoided with all their strength is a small joke between God and human beings, an accident, a poetic, an art, and a possibility. 

"What you see is what you get" is far more than what you see and what you get. With the torrent of history, it hides the path of civilised culture. The small errors that have appeared in it have long been fallacious for thousands of miles. If you want to get close to the truth, you may have to go back to the original starting point.