A lot of us remember those animal statues from our childhoods, made on a real-life scale. It seems that they once flashed through our memories, but their faces were unclear, and what we really recall is that feeling of closeness and familiarity. “What I remember most is a big pair of hands lifting me up, setting me up on a giraffe's back at twice my own height. The way those statues towered over us, they seemed to belong completely to the same continuum as those adults who watched over us.” But, over time, their closeness and familiarity have disappeared. Looking at them again, LIN finds an air of strangeness as they smile apologetically from that space they now inappropriately inhabit. Their smiles have not diminished, but time has added a layer of wear and weariness, which sardonically highlights the helplessness and paradox of their existence. “LIN Yen Wei” presents LIN’s recent painting series of such statues as well as toys. The works follow the same sequence of thought regarding images, painting, and LIN’s investigation of the continuums inhabited by these talismanic objects. Those continuums are ambiguous, located between what is real and what is false, between present and past, and between our uncertainties about our experience. An unusual feeling of distance now surrounds those toys and statues, once they've been bizarrely decorated by a third party, along with the extra surrealism of photography and the narratives of painting. That distance signals us that another kind of real existence is there for them, once their original reality has been rewritten and reworked.