Cloudslin
Lin Dong (Cloudslin) is a Chinese artist and designer based in London. A lifelong painter, his work explores memory, identity, and collective emotion through references to ancient Chinese figurines, Miao national culture, Dunhuang murals, and modern surrealism. Trained in Fashion at Central Saint Martins, he developed a hybrid visual language bridging body and image. After living in Paris during the pandemic, he returned to painting with renewed focus, using daily sketches and personal experience to access raw, primal feeling. His work has been exhibited in London, Shanghai, Beijing, and Guiyang.
This painting marks my first attempt to give visual form to a long-standing emotional state—something difficult to articulate, yet quietly persistent. The black floating shapes are drawn from the “Scattered Flower Apsaras” murals in Cave 305 of the Mogao Caves, Dunhuang (Sui dynasty). Though such motifs frequently appear in Buddhist frescoes, even academic studies have yet to agree on what they truly represent: are they petals, dust, wind, butterflies,or visual notations of divine rhythm?
The scene is set at Hoxton Market in East London, where I currently live. Its everyday energy—the movement of crowds, the density of sound— unexpectedly mirrors the festive, airborne atmosphere of the Dunhuang mural. In this work, the place I inhabit and the place I long for converge through image. The black airborne fragments, once sacred symbols, have become my own language for a personal state of motion—intuitive, unresolved, and quietly present.
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