What first holds you before a painting by Lo Chan Peng is a stillness difficult to name. His figures are quiet, restrained, as if time had come to rest in them, halted midway through some change — already departed from who they were, not yet arrived at who they are becoming. But to take this suspension for his subject is to miss what drives it. Beneath the stillness, the question that has driven him for twenty years is a sharper one: what, in fact, is real?

For in his view, what we call "reality" each day is not the same as truth. Reality is more like a fiction wrapped in layer upon layer: nation, religion, social systems, consumption and the media bind us into orders that appear self-evident yet are man-made. We are born inside these wrappings, believe within them, live within them, and rarely stop to ask what remains beneath. Almost all of Lo Chan Peng's work does one and the same thing — it peels these wrappings away, layer by layer, or sees through them.

This is no imposed reading; it is what he has said again and again. In his ink period he called colour "the false garment of decorum," beneath which the most primal self is at last laid bare. In "Ink Storm" he inverts the real and the illusory, declaring the objective object a delusive appearance and subjective consciousness the only reality. Facing a virtual idol, he invokes the "imagined community," reminding us that nation, religion and money are themselves fictions held in common belief. And his plainest account of his own work is this: to leave, little by little, the thin surface of things, and seek the truth that strikes the heart.

Realism is the blade he peels with. A paradox lives here: he uses the most lifelike of techniques not to praise reality but to expose it — rendering that "reality" flawless so that you first believe it utterly, then, all at once, see through it as one more exquisite wrapping. Plato held that realism was merely the manufacture of illusion; Lo turns this around, using the craft most able to manufacture illusion to unmask illusion itself.

His way of painting is therefore an extension of the same proposition. The glazing of the Renaissance was born of an age that trusted the naked eye, an age that believed light fell honestly upon things. But we no longer meet the world chiefly through the naked eye — the screen has replaced the window, and the pixel, that self-emitting, quantified point of colour, has become the basic grammar of contemporary vision; seeing itself, in other words, is now wrapped in something new. Lo took the layered translucency of classical glazing and turned it to answer this shift, calling it "pixel glazing": building a picture not from reflected light, but from the logic of emitted light. This is, in truth, two kinds of light set against each other on a single surface — the classical reflected light that must pass through layer upon layer of glaze, spending time before it returns to the eye; and the screen's emitted light, instant, flat, without depth. To force these two mutually exclusive lights onto one plane is to force two kinds of time together as well: glazing is a sediment, laid down layer by dried layer and never reversible, while the digital image is without memory, each frame overwriting the last, endlessly refreshable. One translucent layer pressed over another — he uses a layered technique to paint a world wrapped in layers. And that reflected-light material, once the property of the Renaissance, is turned in his hands from a position this very regime of vision had once looked upon from the outside: no longer facing the tradition it inherited, but set against a new and global regime of emitted light — an old instrument of seeing, used to resist a new government of sight. That light, at once classical and digital, at once real and as if seen through a screen, is the very wrapping contemporary humanity now inhabits.

The wrappings he peels keep widening in scope. Early on he looked outward at his own generation: the "Strawberry Generation" series strips away the label that consumer society and the media had fastened onto the young, letting the generation beneath show through — one that could not yet define itself, already quietly bound by politics and nation. Around 2016, a private loss — together with the passing of years and a long preoccupation with religion — drew his gaze inward, and "Ink Storm," "Historic Movers & the Doomed," "Lumière" and "Post-Saints" turned to peel away the far larger wrappings of history, faith and death: history ceases to be the textbook's narrative and becomes an invisible web that shapes us unseen; faith turns from a ready answer back into a question. After his move to the United States, "Homesickness" peels at nation and culture — asking who wrapped up this identity called "Asia," and who has the right to narrate it; while "Hatsune Miku" presses the question to its limit: when a being conceived by collective imagination, purely fictional, begins to possess image and memory, does the line between fiction and truth still hold? From the generation of a single island to humanity's very definition of the real, his inquiry widens like a circle drawn ever larger; its centre never moves — always the same question: beneath the wrappings, what is real?

And the reason he paints his figures forever "in between" is that this is the moment of peeling — the lie already stripped away, the truth not yet reached. Contemporary art and anthropology give this position a name: liminality, from the Latin limen, threshold. His figures stand on that threshold, no longer belonging to the reality just peeled off, not yet across into the truth beyond; "before arrival" means before arrival at the real. And when every wrapping is gone, what truly remains beneath? This is exactly where, the closer he peels, the less he dares to declare. Peel the early layers and beneath them one can still touch the pressed-down flesh of a person; but peeling to this newest layer, he meets the possibility that beneath it there may be nothing at all. And so the real perhaps has no secure floor; it has only changed its hiding place — from "some object pressed at the bottom" to the act of peeling itself, to time. The wear, the burning, the erosion and the stains that recur on his surfaces are not decoration but the sediment time leaves after passing through a body — whether the body of a person or the body of the painting. The philosopher Bergson called this kind of time, uncuttable and to be lived rather than divided, duration. And the reason duration alone cannot be faked is almost physical: once a layer of glaze has dried it can no longer be undone, whatever the painter may wish; once time is pressed irreversibly into the paint, the process cannot be replayed. His figures are still not because they are frozen, but because they carry too much of this time that cannot be undone. He peels with realism because he needs to believe there is truth beneath; and the more he peels, the closer he comes to a bottom that may be empty — the painting is that state in which this longing and this dread refuse to collapse into each other, held apart by the slowness of the flesh.

This duration does not only settle in the grain of his figures; in his paintings it even has a precise location — the edges of the canvas. In a period when, for a time, he could not paint, he still squeezed pigment onto his palette each day: the instinct to paint remained, yet his hand could not reach the surface. Unable to make the image, he could only push the paint to the four edges of the canvas and let it dry and gather there. This was at first an act of helplessness, not of design; yet it later grew into a structure — the front, the image built and rebuilt to be believed, that flawless, seamless "reality"; the edges, holding all that never entered the image: interrupted time, stalled consciousness, the days he longed to paint but could not, layering irreversibly like strata of rock. And so this rim of accumulation became the painting's other half — the front charged with making you believe, the edge with not being faked. What truly moves us in it is that it was never purely designed: an act born of intention, halted by fate, settling into an unmeant trace, and in the end becoming the work's very core. Much of the power of Lo Chan Peng's painting hides in this seam where the deliberate, the accidental and the fated interweave; and the time peeled to the very bottom, which cannot be faked, here too becomes matter one can touch.

In recent years he has let this hidden line show its barest face. In a digital practice called "Ghost," he has all but set down the brush, producing instead a kind of interface debris: images that look leaked from deep within some platform, screen-captured and forwarded, paired with a line of cold system language — a failed payment, an expired notice. There is nothing supernatural here, only a very fine wrongness in the everyday: a system still running normally that, for the first time, lets you sense it is not airtight. When the peeling gaze turns away from the human and toward the social systems we inhabit, the largest wrapping of all — the very fact that "reality runs as usual" — shows its crack. Ghost is the high-risk wing he deliberately keeps, a counterpoint to his slow painting; but the question it asks is the same.

That question grows newly urgent in the age of artificial intelligence. When images generate in an instant, styles can be learned, and taste can be turned into data, humankind has produced a wrapping unlike any before: an image with no body, no accumulation, no duration, yet able to imitate the world's appearance perfectly — a surface with nothing beneath. And it is cheap not because it has no author, but because its time can be rolled back, copied, run again. Lo is not anxious; he studies it, lives alongside it. But he chooses to keep painting, by hand, slowly. The weight of this insistence lies not in what machines cannot do — such claims will, sooner or later, be overtaken — but in its keeping of something that cannot be faked: the span of time, never to be run again, in which a person becomes themselves, the failures, the hesitations, the long uncertainty. Humanity and craft, then, are no longer mere technique, but, in an age where even the real can be synthesised, the last token by which we recognise the real.

Across twenty years, Lo Chan Peng has painted from the young men and women of Taiwan to the leaders of history, to light after loss, to a virtual idol; the wrappings change, one for another, but the peeling hand never stops. Perhaps this is the posture he leaves to his age: at the moment when everyone has grown content with the wrapping, and has even begun to mass-produce it, one person still reaches out, stubbornly, to touch the thing beneath the layers — not yet arrived at, yet perhaps real. Before arrival.