Education
2025 BFA Drawing & Painting
The Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto, Canada
2026 MA Painting
Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom
Exhibitions: Solo
2021 IN MY FEELINGS, Qingdao International Academician Gallery, Qingdao, China
2024 ONE SUMMER’S DAY, Qingdao Art Academy Art Museum, Qingdao, China
Exhibitions: Group
2025 Group Show, Ontario Court of Justice Toronto, Toronto, Canada
2026 The Shape of Anxiety, Chilli Gallery, London, United Kingdom
2026 Salon 0502 THE LAST SALON, The Old Waiting Room, London, United Kingdom
2026 WINTER SALON, Candid Gallery, London, United Kingdom
2026 ELUCIDATE, LumiNoir Art Gallery, The Koppel Project, London, United Kingdom
2026 Collector Access Program - The Viewing Room, Cream Athens / D Contemporary, London, United Kingdom
2026 Group Show, Candid Gallery, London, United Kingdom
2026 Animot, Safe House 1, London, United Kingdom
Collections
2020 Skyfall, Ridley College, St. Catharines, Canada – Permanent Collection
2025 Late Summer Early Autumn, Private Collection, Toronto, Canada
2025 February 3rd 01:36 AM, Ontario Court of Justice, Toronto, Canada – Permanent Collection
2025 ALL ALONG WITH YOU III, Ontario Court of Justice, Toronto, Canada – Permanent Collection
Curatorial Projects
2023 Luxury within Mundane Life, Sheridan College, Toronto, Canada
2023 The Wind Blows, Sheridan College, Toronto, Canada
Biography
Born in 2002 in Qingdao, China. Lives and works in Toronto, Canada and London, United Kingdom.
Guangyu Zhang is a contemporary artist working in abstraction, primarily working with acrylic paint. Obtained his BFA in Drawing & Painting at OCAD University, Toronto, and is currently pursuing an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London.
Zhang has exhibited internationally in both solo and group exhibitions, with works held in private and institutional collections worldwide. His practice explores sincerity within abstraction, treating each canvas as a site of negotiation between inner and outer worlds. Through layered gestures and material traces, his paintings reveal tensions between presence and absence, forming a personal visual language grounded in honesty, memory, and embodied experience.
Artist Statement
Zhang’s practice uses abstraction to explore how the self is shaped through relation with others. He is interested in the idea that the “I” cannot be fully perceived in isolation, but becomes visible through encounter, distance, friction, and trust.
Through accumulation, interruption, erasure, and revision, Zhang treats the canvas as a field where emotion is held in suspension rather than directly explained. His paintings move between attachment and separation, intimacy and resistance, presence and absence.
Rather than illustrating personal narratives, Zhang’s work delays meaning, allowing unresolved emotions, memory, and vulnerability to remain open. For him, abstraction becomes a way to ask how relation gives form to the self.