"Between the Visible and the Invisible", might "the Veil of Form" conjure "Things That Resist Becoming Images"? The solo exhibition Form, "Form", F-o-r-m by Lin Yulong will be presented at Hefei space from December 6, 2025, to January 21, 2026. It marks the artist's first collaboration with KeYi Gallery, bringing together new pieces from his three series.
As a (once) iconic form, the silo long fascinated modernist architecture. Yet "an object that serves as a model admits no uncertainty," a judgement that often blinds us to "all the labour that takes place within such a space." In Lin's works, one may easily sense an architectural atmosphere, but what matters more is his attempt to tease apart "form." Entering through the industrial logic, geometric prototypes, and non-decorative order systems signalled by the silo, the artist begins his practice with basic lines, loosening the order from within and, in doing so, opening new possibilities for the image.
In "Between the Visible and the Invisible", painting is approached as a spatial mechanism of interfaces, folds, and embedded units. Where the panels join and fold, the layers align and misalign; texture and colour are likewise drawn into the process. Roughness gives the interface its weight, while the brighter units bring a secondary space into view. The eye thus slips between outer and inner, leaving the line between "visible" and "invisible" in continual negotiation.
With "The Veil of Form", the focus shifts to how things emerge within the veil of painting, and how they withdraw into themselves. "Form" here is neither literal nor abstract; its stacked arches and curves can be read as a skin in formation. In turn, the "background" is not a recessive plane but the first veil, brushed and dragged to press the form forward. The "lines," meanwhile, cross both: they skirt the contour, climbing, bending, or dropping away, tracing an edge only to lose it. From these relations unfolds a triple veiling, in which the image lives in a cycle of appearing and retreating.
Where, then, does painting begin—with the image, or with its undoing? In "Things That Resist Becoming Images", the artist nears this structural suspicion. Pigment drips, driven by gravity, register resistance, rupture, and reversal, like residues of visual time; lines, normally tasked with order, thin into "intervened trajectories." In this composition, the artist keeps his distance from any clear path, making the act of painting the image's true object.
Things come before judgement, the image comes after form. In German, Bild names both "image" and "picture," a folding that conceals their difference and mixture. Returning from a German art education, Lin Yulong makes this distinction visible again through his repeated calibration of "form"; and in "seeing the thing in all things," he finds "the possibility of constructing things."
