Formless, Imageless
Artists: HONGYU ZHANG
2026-08-03 – 2026-08-19 · Hangzhou · L Gallery
Formless, Imageless — solo exhibition by HONGYU ZHANG at L Gallery, Hangzhou, 3 Aug – 19 Aug 2026.
Distorted faces, silent bodies, or emotions that resist articulation: we search for contours, identities, and causes, instinctively, assembling scattered traces into images that fall within the bounds of our own experience. We try to see others clearly, while finding ourselves reflected in them.
Hongyu’s paintings place the human figure between emergence and disappearance. Lines repeatedly traverse faces and bodies, while acts of covering, erasure, and superimposition continually interrupt recognition. The figures seem to draw near, only to recede—just as they are about to come into focus—into the depths of pigment, brushstroke, and trace. Gradually, the image begins to drift and destabilize, slipping free of fixed identities and narratives.
“Unforming” describes both a pictorial condition and a mode of seeing, while “Beyond the Image” allows the image to withdraw, for a time, from recognizability and narration. When expression, identity, and story cease to provide answers, how do we continue to seek meaning? And how do we project our past experiences onto the images before us?
What remains after unforming and moving beyond the image is that which has yet to be clearly seen, named, or judged. True proximity may not begin with seeing completely, but with arriving at what Deleuze described as “a clarity destroyed by clarity.”
