Don Gallery Gallery in Shanghai

Xuhui · Contemporary programme

Editorial Profile

Don Gallery is a commercial contemporary art gallery established in Shanghai in 2007, with a program built around the sustained development of Chinese contemporary art and what the gallery describes as the "symbiosis" of the local art ecology. Operating from the Xuhui district, within the West Bund arts corridor that has become one of contemporary art in Shanghai's most concentrated institutional zones, the gallery occupies a position at the intersection of the Chinese art market and international curatorial circuits. Its roster spans artists across generations — from those born in the 1950s to those emerging in the 1990s — reflecting an ambition to situate contemporary production within longer historical trajectories. The represented artists work across a range of media including painting, installation, sculpture, photography, and time-based practices. ZHANG Ruyi, whose materially precise installations have gained considerable international traction, received the Asian Cultural Council New York Fellowship in 2025 and participated in the 14th Taipei Biennial, while ZHANG Yunyao's figurative painting practice has entered museum contexts including an exhibition tied to the Louvre's collection at Musée Fenaille in France and a group show at Bortolami in New York.

The gallery's engagement with institutions extends to collaborations with Yuz Museum and Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong, and it regularly participates in major international art fairs, sustaining the visibility of its artists beyond China. This dual orientation — attentive to local artistic genealogies while actively building international institutional relationships — distinguishes Don Gallery within the broader field of galleries in Shanghai, where it functions as both a platform for mid-career and established Chinese artists and a connector to global exhibition networks.

Selected Artists

ZHANG Ruyi

Chinese

InstallationSculptureMixed Media
About

Shanghai-based artist whose practice centers on the logic of the everyday, working with industrial materials such as concrete, ceramic tiles, and rebar to examine relationships between the individual, urban environments, and the shifting emotional register of contemporary life.

ZHANG Yunyao

Chinese

DrawingPaintingMixed Media
About

Working primarily on felt with graphite, charcoal, and pigment, Zhang Yunyao probes art history, desire, memory, and the human condition through figurative compositions that navigate themes of power, the body, and cultural taboo.

WANG Ningde

Chinese

PhotographyInstallation
About

Beijing-based photographer who systematically interrogates the structural mechanisms of photographic image-making, producing light-based works on honeycomb aluminum and manipulated photographic paper that examine illusion, materiality, and the nature of representation.

LIU Ren

Chinese

PaintingSculptureInstallation
About

Shanghai-based artist who transforms disposable everyday materials—straw paper, eggshells, gold foil—into conceptually charged works concerned with the passage of time, the consumption of life, and the fragile condition of human existence.

LU Song

Chinese

Painting
About

Painter working in acrylic whose atmospheric, low-saturation compositions blur the boundary between reality and fiction; his serial works—foggy gardens, dense foliage, layered spatial environments—evoke a sense of time suspended and matter slowly dissolving.

LI Shan

Chinese

Painting
About

Veteran Chinese painter with a practice spanning several decades, represented by Don Gallery and featured in institutional exhibitions across Europe and Asia; her work engages questions of painting, temporality, and landscape within the lineage of Chinese contemporary art.

Selected Exhibitions

Hippocampus Capsule

Group show2023

CAO Zaifei, CHANG Ling, GUO Haiqiang, LI Shan, LIU Ren, LU Song, WANG Ningde, WU Houting, ZHANG Peiyun, ZHANG Ruyi, ZHANG Yunyao, James CARL, Kumi Usui

About

A gallery-wide group survey of thirty works spanning 2011–2022 by thirteen artists, using the hippocampus as a metaphor for memory, historical layering, and the intertwined conceptual trajectories shared across the gallery's roster.

PaintingSculptureInstallation

ZHANG Ruyi: Once Remain, Once Remould

Solo show2023

ZHANG Ruyi

About

ZHANG Ruyi's fourth solo at Don Gallery, presenting new works in concrete, mosaic tile, rebar, and construction debris to probe the emotional residue embedded within urban infrastructure and cycles of building and dissolution.

InstallationSculptureMixed Media

LI Shan: A Red, Red Blossom

Solo show2023

LI Shan

About

A solo presentation of LI Shan's oil paintings — including works from her 1970s practice with the underground No Name Art Group — exploring nature, seasonal beauty, and light through intimate, lyrical compositions.

Painting

CAO Zaifei: The Room of Sisyphus

Solo show2023

CAO Zaifei

About

CAO Zaifei's second solo at Don Gallery, combining oil on canvas works and ready-made interventions to stage objects and figures within scenarios of philosophical absurdity, invoking both classical metaphysics and the absurdity of contemporary existence.

PaintingMixed Media

WU Houting: 2066

Solo show2023

WU Houting

About

A presentation of fifteen sculptures examining the spatial and temporal conditions of mass-produced commodities, using deformations and gaps incurred during manufacture and transit to reflect critically on the mythology of industrial production.

Sculpture

WANG Ningde: The Deluge

Solo show2024

WANG Ningde

About

Curated by ZHANG Li, this solo exhibition presents WANG Ningde's latest works interrogating the ontological and material limits of photography through manipulated photographic paper, artificial light, and experimental printing processes.

PhotographyInstallation

LU Song: A Warm Breath Set the Leaves Stirring

Solo show2024

LU Song

About

Curated by WANG Jiang, this solo brings together LU Song's large-format acrylic works in low-saturation, atmospheric tones, suspending landscapes and spatial environments between perception, memory, and the slow dissolution of material form.

Painting

ZHANG Yunyao: Palace of Alienation, Part II

Solo show2024

ZHANG Yunyao

About

Second chapter of ZHANG Yunyao's major series, featuring new graphite-on-felt works using simian imagery to probe Marxist theories of estrangement and the increasingly blurred boundary between human and non-human conditions.

DrawingMixed Media

Gallery Overview

Don Gallery
City
Shanghai
Area
Xuhui
Address
1863 Huai Hai Zhong Lu, Xu Hui Qu, Shang Hai Shi, China, 200031
Type
Gallery
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