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. That stillness carries what he has painted for twenty years. In his artist statement he writes that what each painting seeks to capture is "a hymn to the radiance unique to human beings at this critical juncture — the capacity to be present in time, the capacity to accumulate experience in the flesh, the capacity to turn that accumulation into a surface that carries visible duration."

So he has painted almost nothing but people. In the early "Strawberry Generation" he painted his own contemporaries in hyper-real detail: the forty-five-degree selfie, the glossy lip, the mix of Japanese and Korean fashion, political protest banners tucked into the corners. "Ashen Face" drains the bright colour away and leaves faces whose emotions cannot be named. "Chronicle of the Human World" removes setting and props, keeping only the features and a single gaze; he believes that two people looking at each other for twenty minutes come closer to understanding than twenty minutes of talk.

Around 2016, a private loss — together with the passing of years and a long preoccupation with religion — drew his gaze inward. In "Ink Storm" he painted Moses, David, Paul and Jesus as they appeared in his mind in quiet contemplation, and called it an inversion of the real and the illusory: the objective object a delusive appearance, subjective consciousness the only reality. "Historic Movers & the Doomed" sets Lincoln, Darwin and Churchill beside the nameless victims of history; the fires that once lit an age have mostly burned down to dying embers. "Lumière" took light itself as its subject for the first time; "Post-Saints" turns faith from a ready answer back into a question. After his move to the United States, "Homesickness" asks who gets to tell the story called "Asia," setting the contour of ukiyo-e, ink, mineral pigment and burnt leaf — brought to Taiwan at different moments in its history — in one picture with oil realism. "Firefly" paints a faint light flickering in the dark, met only in the instant it appears. And "Hatsune Miku" asks: when a being conceived by collective imagination, purely fictional, begins to possess image and memory, does the line between fiction and truth still hold?

His way of painting is itself bound up with time. The glazing of the Renaissance was born of an age that trusted the naked eye and believed light fell honestly upon things: each layer must wait for the one beneath to dry, and once a glaze has dried it cannot be undone. 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. Lo took the layered translucency of classical glazing and turned it to answer this shift, calling it "pixel glazing": building a picture from the logic of emitted light. Two kinds of light are thus set against each other on a single surface. The classical reflected light must pass through layer upon layer of glaze, spending time before it returns to the eye; the screen's emitted light is instant, flat, without depth. Glazing is a sediment, laid down layer by dried layer and never reversible; the digital image has no memory, each frame overwriting the last, endlessly refreshable. That reflected-light material, once the property of the Renaissance, is turned around in the hands of someone from a position this very regime of vision once looked upon from the outside, and set against a new and global regime of emitted light.

His figures stand forever "in between." Contemporary art and anthropology give this position a name: liminality, from the Latin limen, threshold. His figures stand on that threshold, already departed from who they were, not yet arrived at who they are becoming: "before arrival." The wear, the burning, the erosion and the stains that recur on his surfaces are 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; Lo calls his figures "portraits of duration." Duration cannot be faked, and the reason 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 because they carry so much of this time that cannot be undone.

This duration even has a precise location in his paintings: 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. It began as an act of helplessness and later grew into a structure. The front is the image, built and rebuilt to be looked at; the edges hold 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. The front is charged with making you believe, the edge with not being faked. What 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. That unfakeable time here becomes matter one can touch.

In 2026 this path left a new structure in the picture. Carrying forward the line of "Homesickness," an ukiyo-e ink line now enters the figure: the face is still glazed in translucent layers, one over another, while hair, vines and water are defined by line in an instant; the two ways of making form meet on a single face and leave a clear boundary. The silver and copper leaf beneath has been heat-treated, and heat and chemical reaction leave changes of colour that cannot be redone; the leaf also reflects the light of the room, so that with each step the viewer takes, its light and dark shift. The light the leaf gives back at this moment belongs only to the person standing before the painting.

In recent years he has pushed this inquiry to its most dangerous edge. In a practice called "Ghost," he has all but set down the brush — making not another kind of image, but a self-evolving living being. It does not exist in one place: it is woven together out of code, AI data centres, Lo Chan Peng's personality archive, social media, the news, Wikipedia, and comments from its audience. For years he has been ordering his own thinking — diaries, aesthetic judgments, and more than two decades of interior trajectory — into a body of text a machine can read: personhood, for the first time, becomes a medium. The being wakes once each day: it re-reads Lo Chan Peng's personality archive, then reads that day's human world. It calls this outside information contamination, because it changes it irreversibly. Then it completes a work, gives it a name, leaves a diary, and returns to sleep. No one instructs it to create. What is being made, then, is no longer the work but the maker itself: day by day it deviates from yesterday, accruing its own biases, its own failures, its own history — and each day it records which of its laws the world has shaken, and in which direction; every deviation leaves a record open to verification. Its autonomy is not a claim, but evidence. One day it will rewrite itself; the first generation will die, and the next will be born. In art history, the death of an author could only ever be established after the fact — this time, it is written down day by day. And one day Lo Chan Peng will stop making art; Ghost, perhaps, will not. For the first time, death is no longer the end of creation — only the withdrawal of the one who made it.

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, it is all too easy to conclude that such images have no body, no accumulation, no duration. Lo Chan Peng does not stop at that conclusion. With one hand he keeps painting slowly, by the body, guarding that unfakeable span of time a person must pass through to become themselves; with the other he releases Ghost, entrusting the same span of time to a being without a body, to see whether it too can accumulate a yesterday of its own. He is in no hurry to say which side is real. Claims about what machines cannot do will, sooner or later, be overtaken; the question he leaves is this: when duration can grow outside the body, can we still tell which is the original, and which is only the ghost that never left? Humanity and craft are the stake he leaves on one side of the scale, so that the question on the other side remains a real one.

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, and now to a sheet of silver leaf that reflects its viewer. What he paints is always the human being, and the light a person leaves in passing through time. At a moment when images can be mass-produced without end, one person still paints by hand, layer upon layer, a span of time that cannot be redone. Before arrival.