Paris-based Chinese artist Yunyao Zhang will hold her first solo exhibition with White Cube this autumn, with When the Surface Thinks running from 30 October to 19 December 2026 at the gallery's Hong Kong space on Connaught Road Central. Born in Shanghai in 1985, Zhang has built her practice around drawing in graphite and pastel on felt — a support she favours because marks on it are permanent and cannot be reworked the way oil paint can. The exhibition brings together works from her ongoing Connector and Time series, begun in 2022 and 2021 respectively, alongside studies after classical statuary. Trained in oil painting — she graduated from Shanghai Normal University in 2007 — Zhang has made drawing her primary medium, drawn to the immediacy of a surface that records every decision without the possibility of correction. Her international profile has grown steadily over the past decade. A solo show at Perrotin Hong Kong came in 2017; she has been represented by Galerie Marguo in Paris since around 2020 and by Don Gallery in Shanghai; and her work has appeared at the Lyon Biennale in 2022, the Musee Fenaille in Rodez in a project co-curated with the Louvre, the Musee des beaux-arts de Caen in 2023, and the twelfth SITE SANTA FE in 2025. A group presentation at Bortolami in New York opened in January 2026. The White Cube exhibition is her most significant platform with a global gallery to date, placing her distinctive felt drawings before Hong Kong's collector audience at a moment when the gallery is also deepening its Asia programme. For an artist whose method turns on the tension between control and irreversibility, the show offers a first large-scale test of how her quietly demanding works register in a major commercial setting.