Biography

ZHANG Ruyi (b.1985) currently lives and works in Shanghai. Her practice and work unfold around the logic of every day and occupy a unique space which reconciles artefacts, industrial experience, and urban life. The artist 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. Her work mainly involves site-specific installation, sculpture, and integrated media, using "reality" as a model to draw out the shaping of individual emotions as the city shifts around its inhabitants, and planting intuition and observation in simple materials through the visual language of paradoxical transformation, to bestow a spiritual significance which extends beyond the material.

 

Recent institutional exhibitions include the 12th SITE SANTA FE International “Once Within A Time”(Santa Fe, US, 2025), the 14th Taipei Biennial “Whispers on the Horizon”(Taipei, 2025), Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai, 2024), Times Museum (Guangzhou,2024), Yuz Museum (Shanghai, 2023), the 16th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art - “Manifesto of Fragility” (Lyon, 2022), He Art Museum (Foshan, Guang Dong, 2022), Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong, 2022), Power Station of Art (Shanghai, 2021), TANK Shanghai Art Centre (Shanghai, 2021), UCCA Dune (Beijing, 2020), the K11 Art Foundation (Hong Kong, 2019) and other institutions. Her featured solo exhibitions include “Once Remain, Once Remould” (Don Gallery, Shanghai, 2023), "ZHANG Ruyi: Speaking Softly" (UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2022), "Modern Fossil" (START Museum, Shanghai, 2022), "Consciousness of Location " (Don Gallery, Shanghai, 2019), "Bonsai" (François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles, 2019), etc.

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