When presented with visual stimuli of face images, the ventral stream visual cortex of the human brain exhibits face-specifc activity that is modulated by the physical properties of the input images. However, it is still unclear whether this activity relates to conscious face perception. We explored this issue by using the human intracranial electroencephalography technique. Our results showed that face-specifc activity in the ventral stream visual cortex was signifcantly higher when the subjects subjectively saw faces than when they did not, even when face stimuli were presented in both conditions. In addition, the face-specifc neural activity exhibited a more reliable neural response and increased posterior-anterior direction information transfer in the “seen” condition than the “unseen” condition. Furthermore, the face-specifc neural activity was signifcantly correlated with performance. These fndings support the view that face-specifc activity in the ventral stream visual cortex is linked to conscious face perception.