/Exhibition/
Formless, Imageless
Role: Curator
Artists: Hongyu Zhang
Time: 2026/8/3-2026/8/19
Address: L Gallery, B103, Subterranean Plaza, Qian Tang Aviation Building, Hangzhou City
Distorted faces, silent bodies, or emotions that resist articulation instinctively prompt us to search for contours, identities, and causes, assembling scattered traces into images that fit within the boundaries of our own experience. In trying to see others clearly, we may instead find ourselves reflected in them.
Zhang Hongyu’s paintings position the human figure between emergence and disappearance. Lines repeatedly pass through faces and bodies, while covering, erasure, and layering continually interrupt recognition. The figures seem to approach, only to retreat at the moment they are about to become clear, withdrawing into the depths of paint, brushwork, and accumulated traces. Gradually, the image becomes unstable and unmoored, slipping away from fixed identities and established narratives.
“Formless” describes both a pictorial condition and a way of looking; “Imageless” allows the image to withdraw temporarily from recognition and narration. When expression, identity, and story cease to provide answers, how do we continue to seek meaning? How do we project our past experiences onto what we see?
After form has dissolved and the image has withdrawn, what remains is that which has yet to be fully seen, named, or judged. Genuine closeness may not begin with seeing everything clearly, but with arriving at what Deleuze described as “a clarity destroyed by clarity.”
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