Don Gallery/Artro is pleased to announce Sweetheart, the first solo exhibition in Japan by Chinese artist ZHANG Yunyao, presented in collaboration with Artro Space/Don Gallery from November 12 to December 14, 2025. The exhibition unfolds across two sites of distinct historical and cultural resonance in Kyoto — Artro Space and Keishun-in, a sub-temple within the renowned Myōshin-ji complex. The opening reception will take place on November 14, 2025.
Structured as a dual-site exhibition, Sweetheart stages a dialogue between the secular and the spiritual, the material and the imaginary. ZHANG’s long-standing practice centers on felt as his primary medium, a material whose tactile softness and resilience become vessels for emotion and the passage of time. Through the repeated acts of rubbing, drawing, and layering with graphite and charcoal, his images emerge and dissolve within the accumulation of time, oscillating between clarity and blur, presence and disappearance.
Located in the heart of Kyoto, Artro Space occupies a century-old earthen storehouse originally built during the Meiji era. Once used as a warehouse, the building has been carefully transformed into a contemporary art gallery that preserves its historical texture while embracing new artistic life. A café situated at the entrance connects art with everyday experience, transforming the act of viewing into a more intimate encounter.
Responding to this context of daily sensibility, ZHANG presents a series of still-life works depicting desserts and vessels rendered on felt. These images, soft in tone yet precise in form, evoke both sensory delight and quiet philosophical reflection on desire, tenderness, and fragility. Here, Sweetheart transcends its literal sweetness to become a metaphor for the intimacy between human and object — a “gentle gaze” that has been both consumed and reconstructed in contemporary life.
Built in the 16th century, Keishun-in, part of Myoshin-ji Temple, stands as one of Kyoto’s most historically significant Zen temples and is designated as a tangible cultural heritage site by the city. Its meditative gardens and architectural restraint embody the Japanese aesthetic concepts of Ma (間, the space between) and Mujō (無常, impermanence). Within this contemplative setting, ZHANG will present the latest phase of his ongoing Time series — twenty small-scale felt drawings created in 2025.
Initiated in 2021, Time is an evolving body of work in which ZHANG transforms the sculptural visages of different eras and geographies into a dissolving visual language through repetitive, meditative drawing. For the Kyoto presentation, the new works focus on Noh and Gigaku masks, symbols deeply embedded in Japanese performance and spirituality. These masks, poised between personhood and emptiness, form, and spirit, encapsulate a delicate tension central to Japanese aesthetics.
In Noh theatre, the stillness of a mask is never devoid of expression; rather, it embodies infinite emotional potential. ZHANG reinterprets this cultural form through his characteristic “de-figurative” approach, transforming ritual objects into meditations on time and existence. The blurred lines and faded layers within his drawings echo the reverberation of memory — resonating with Zen notions of emptiness (kū) while extending the artist’s ongoing inquiry into perception, embodiment, and temporality.
As ZHANG Yunyao’s first solo exhibition in Japan, Sweetheart represents not only a continuation of his artistic trajectory but also a cross-cultural exploration of “soft thinking” — an inquiry into sensitivity, time, and touch across Chinese and Japanese aesthetic systems. From the minimalist calm of Artro’s café to the spiritual quietude of Keishun-in’s garden, the exhibition traces a continuous flow between the worldly and the contemplative, the material and the conceptual. Within these shifting spaces, ZHANG’s works unfold as meditations on the texture of time — at once a moment of sweetness, and a silent disappearance.
