Frieze London 2026: London
Don Gallery’s booth will bring together Koushna Navabi, LIN Fanglu, LIU Ren, ZHANG Ruyi, and ZHANG Yunyao — five artists working across painting, textile, installation and sculpture—whose practices converge around a shared question: how images and forms are not merely represented, but generated through time, material, and bodily processes.
Koushna Navabi, transforms “feminine” techniques such as knitting, stitching, and weaving into a charged visual language that entangles body, desire, power, and cultural memory. Her works oscillate between surface and wound, protection and exposure, and revealing structural tensions between suppression, desire, and geopolitical power.
LIN Fanglu’s practice centers on textiles, traditional craft, and female experience. Working with fiber as her primary medium, she brings together the body, labor, time, and cultural memory. Her sustained engagement with textiles is rooted in her research into traditional practices such as Bai tie-dyeing, as well as in her ongoing collaboration with local women artisans. By deliberately retaining traces of labor—stitching, binding, and tying—within her works, LIN brings female experiences and lived narratives, often obscured within the textures of everyday life and history, back into the realm of visibility.
LIU Ren adopts a deliberately slowed, efficiency-resistant way of working, translating and reconfiguring images, texts, and everyday events. Central to this approach is his sustained use of everyday materials such as straw paper as vessels for the accumulation of information, allowing fleeting or rapidly consumed experiences to find resistance and suspension within matter, ultimately condensing into presences of physical weight.
ZHANG Ruyi’s artistic practice is centered around the logic of the everyday, occupying a unique space through the reconciliation of artifacts, industrial experiences, and urban life. She draws inspiration from commonplace materials, exploring and mediating the hierarchy and interplay between the individual, the material, and the place as a key narrative pathway.
ZHANG Yunyao’s large-scale felt drawings likewise resist visual certainty. Through an extremely time-consuming and bodily intensive process, he repeatedly layers graphite onto fibrous surfaces, producing forms that resemble skin, organs, or geological formations. His images hover between abstraction and corporeality—both seductive and unsettling. Drawing is no longer a window onto an image, but a surface worked, compressed, and eroded by time and the body.
Images here are no longer windows, but thicknesses; no longer instants, but accumulations of time. The booth thus constructs a shared field of inquiry into slowness, materiality, embodiment, and becoming, inviting viewers to encounter form as something continuously forming—at the intersection of skin and time.
