Ken Mar

My work is based on the idea that our reality may be a computer simulation. The strange coincidences and unlikely events in life are clues that we may exist within an invented narrative. The paintings are a simplified reality existing in our live...

My work is based on the idea that our reality may be a computer simulation. The strange coincidences and unlikely events in life are clues that we may exist within an invented narrative. The paintings are a simplified reality existing in our lived reality, which in turn may be nested inside yet another reality. Children are depicted within the artifice of Disneyland, silhouetted on blank linen. People inhabit stylized characters just as players inhabit video game avatars. The empty space of the linen background is a void similar to the empty background in a dream or the vague background in a video game. The paintings are meditations on fundamental questions: Is this real? Am I dreaming? Am I real? How likely is it that we are in a simulation? If advances in technology will eventually make it possible to create virtual realities that are indistinguishable from actual reality, how do we know it hasn’t already happened? If these simulations do exist there will be a vast and countless number of them running. The likelihood of finding ourselves in the original base reality would be but a tiny probability. Hence, I may be living in the Matrix playing a character who is a 21st-century artist. My audience would include the observers running the simulation and I would need to consider what kind of art interests them. — “Suddenly he woke up and there he was… But he didn’t know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that it was Zhuangzi.” – Zhuangzi, Taoist philosopher, 4th century BC