Don Gallery is pleased to share that ZHANG Yunyao is participating in the group exhibition "360°: Why We Paint?" at BY ART MATTERS.From 16 May 2025 to 12 October 2025, BY ART MATTERS and Il Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Italy will jointly present this group exhibition.
The exhibition was conceived by Francesco Bonami, Director of BY ART MATTERS, and Wu Tian, Deputy Director, and co-curated by Sun Man, Curator at BY ART MATTERS, and Stefano Collicelli Cagol, Director of the Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art.
Beginning with the personal motivations of each artist, the exhibition explores how painting — one of the most ancient forms of visual expression — has become a reflection of today’s "glocalised" world, connecting local narratives with global contexts across three interlinked regions; it also features over one hundred remarkable works by 39 artists from around the world, created in the decades following the millennium and shown within the context of these two leading art institutions. The exhibition aims to spark a cross-generational and cross-cultural dialogue centred on the current state of painting.
This is a series of works that ZHANG Yunyao plans to continue to work on for years, which will consist of 100 sketches on felt, all of the same size. The artist named this series of works "Time", which not only refers to its literal meaning, but also gives them the freedom to extend and sublimate. ZHANG Yunyao began to create this series in 2021, and has presented the first phase - 42 of them - in 2025 at BY ART MATTERS (Hangzhou, China).
As part of the second section of the group exhibition "Extensions of Image-Making Boundaries ", ZHANG Yunyao built an infinitely extended space constructed by four mirrored walls and a light-filtering ceiling on top of it. The artist "suspended" 42 sketches on felt in a separate exhibition space to respond to the current situation of multiple parallel and intertwined media or technologies such as painting, drawing, photography, and printing, and to face questions such as "What is painting?" that were born after the sigh of "painting is dead" (French painter Paul Delaroche).
These close-up sketches of the eyes of ancient statues are placed at the same eyelevel of the audiences', and the one-way "watching" has become "gazing at each other" to some extent. The artist tries to break the traditional presentation of common paintings or sketches, weakening the technical expression of individual works, and emphasizing the order, continuity and irreversibility of the concept of "time" conveyed by the series as a whole idea.
In psychology and philosophy, "time" is normally considered to be a subjective, relative, and sometimes vague experience. ZHANG Yunyao slowly reveals the clues hidden behind "time" to the audience by repeatedly and constantly depicting these ancient and specific sculpture close-ups - when we stand clearly opposite to "time", we can finally distinguish the past, the present and the future.
9 July 2025
