And so he turned to face his own generation. "Strawberry Generation" is, first of all, a wrapping — a label fastened onto those born in the 1980s by their elders, the media and consumer society together: soft, bruising at a touch. The first thing Lo did was to paint that wrapping, with the most painstaking hyperrealism, in merciless detail: glossed lips, the selfie angled down from forty-five degrees, the mix of Japanese and Korean style. He paints it so convincingly that you begin to doubt — is this gloss the young themselves, or a garment someone else dressed them in?

This is his lifelong method: to render "reality" flawless with extreme realism, so that you first believe it completely, then see through it as a mere wrapping. When critics invoked Baudelaire's line from *Les Fleurs du mal* — a sickly race's heartfelt homage to youth — to understand him, the point lay not in "sickly" but in his taking a disdained label and treating it, gravely, as something to be unwrapped. Plato said realism was merely the manufacture of illusion; Lo turns this around, using the technique most able to manufacture illusion to expose illusion itself.

What lies beneath the wrapping? A generation that could not yet define itself. The traditional-pattern tattoos recurring on his stylish girls are evidence of an older era's notions still bound to the new; and the protest banners tucked into a corner — seemingly incidental, in fact deliberate — betray that beneath the wrapping of youth lies a deeper layer still: nation and politics. Layer within layer — this is exactly the structure he will peel at for the next twenty years: reality is never truth, but something wrapped, by nation, society and consumption, layer over layer.

So when you are drawn in by that lifelike surface and then slip toward the unspeakable emptiness beneath it, the gaze reverses. You think you are unwrapping them; in truth they are unwrapping you — is there not, on your own body, the same garment society has dressed you in? This reversal of the gaze, the hidden line running through all his work, opens its eyes here for the first time; and it opens them precisely to see through the wrapping.