Cloudslin
Passing Memory, 2026, oil on canvas, 50 x 72 cm, £1,580
About this work:
Inspired by a train journey from Belgrade to Čačak during my travels in the Balkans, this painting brings together observation and memory. A toy horse encountered during the trip echoed one from my childhood, and reappears in the train window reflection, where the passing landscape and memory briefly merge.
I paint to hold onto what slips away. My work begins in observation of places I’ve lived, objects half-remembered, and gestures that echo across time. These fragments become layered compositions in oil, pastel, and fabric, where colour behaves like memory, fluid, unstable, and quietly persistent.
Having lived among the Miao people and studied their visual culture, I see painting as a way to carry histories through mark-making. I often incorporate textile techniques and spatial arrangements into my work, reflecting my background in fashion and installation. What I return to, again and again, is the act of painting as a form of containment of presence, of absence, of what cannot be said. Each piece becomes a kind of portable shrine: part window, part wound.
About the Artist:
Cloudslin (Lin Dong) is an artist working primarily in painting, based in London. His work engages memory, cultural displacement, and the residual emotional textures of everyday life. He grew up in northern China and spent part of his early life in Miao communities in southwest China, where visual experience was shaped by a mix of local craft traditions and vernacular imagery, alongside references such as ancient figurative objects and Dunhuang wall paintings.
He trained in fashion design at Central Saint Martins, and this background informs a sensitivity to surface, structure, and the body as a site of construction and perception. In painting, the image is approached less as representation than as something formed through material presence and accumulated visual memory.
His work has been exhibited in the UK and China, including The Minories (Colchester), Blackout Gallery (London), TX Mall (Shanghai), and online with Homiens (USA).