50 cm

Zhou Tianyu

4th June 2026 – 27th June 2026
Opening 3rd June, 18:00 – 20:30


Tianyu Zhou, something is dropping, 2026, 40 x 30cm, Oil linen

Breadcrumbs, drifts, compressed intervals, and suspensions.

“There are things I’m trying to hide, and things I’m trying to find out meanings. It’s a reveal of the awkwardness inside reality, a destruction to common sense.” — Zhou Tianyu

Breadcrumbs are not so much the residue of a thing as a trace of a process. In this exhibition there is an intuitive exploration not only of in-between states but also of processes of becoming such as intuition and imagination. As viewers, we not only enter into an encounter with worlds of difference within in-between structures, but are also drawn into journeys not fixed by outcomes.

Paul Klee said that drawing was like taking a line for a walk. Drawing in this light was the means of linking all the different scales of the universe into a continuous weaving process that shifted from the perceptual to the imaginative. Thus, interior and exterior elements could be linked into a continuous process of becoming. It is not a case of approaching a meeting place as if already fixed in place by external appearances, but of discovering a cross-over point where a possible world might reside. It is a case of a world on the move. There is no law or schema capable of discharging a readymade structure to be read in advance of appearance, but rather an opening of a field of realignments. We cannot be certain as to what is moving towards dissolution or what is sinking into a state of otherness because measure has been dissolved as a means of providing a stance. We might assemble artists or periods which appear to be of relevance to this practice; but it might be more to the point to seek out the figures that can be detected, given the way we might come to reside in the realm of figures, as opposed to figurations predicated on recognition of styles and manners.

If we are placed into the realm of breadcrumbs then an optical edge might provide orientation to a world sliding out of fixed outcomes. Particles of sand require other attributions so the desert or the beach provide a destiny, whereas breadcrumbs are not so readily invested by couplets of sense. We can be swallowed up by sand but breadcrumbs appear only able to provide enough energy for self-circulation. Modernity was in many ways an impulse to explore the difference between things as they are and things as they might become. Such impulses are not those of representation but reside in matter untouched by language in pursuit of answers. Instead, we are left to stray within a tonal poetics outside of the temporality of this and that.

 

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Zhou Tianyu (b. 2000, Shanghai, China) holds an MFA in Fine Art from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and a BFA in Fine Art (Painting) from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (UCL). She currently lives and works in London.

Solo Exhibitions

  • It’s a natural cause, Ginkgo Space, Shenzhen (2025)

Group Exhibitions

  • Ruskin Postgraduate Degree Show, Ruskin School of Art, Oxford (2025)
  • In Here We Shine, Y2 Gallery, Shenzhen (2024)
  • Resonate with Fragmentation, Ginkgo Space, Shanghai and Shenzhen (2024)
  • Nominees and winner of WSA Painting Prize , The Winchester Gallery, Winchester (2023)
  • Slade Undergraduate Degree Show, Slade School of Fine Art, London (2023)