Opening reception
11 November, 6:30 - 9 pm
The Sunday Painter is pleased to announce It follows me quietly still, a solo exhibition by Zearo (b. 1996 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, lives and works in London, UK). Please join us for the opening reception on the 11th of November from 6.30–9pm. The exhibition continues until the 19th of December.
Centred on a single, sixteen-metre pastel painting that envelops the gallery’s main space, the exhibition takes New Park in Taipei as its point of departure, one of the earliest sites in the Sinophone world where queer men gathered openly. The park became widely known through Pai Hsien-yung’s seminal novel Crystal Boys (1983), later adapted for film in 1986, which traces the lives of young gay men on the margins of Taiwanese society. In Zearo’s painting, it emerges as a place of refuge and exposure, where desire finds expression under the shadow of social judgement and institutional control. Men lean against trees, wait and drift apart beneath a full moon, their encounters recurring without resolution.
Drawing on medieval compositional structures and the shifting perspectives of Chinese handscrolls, Zearo’s works function as both architectural containers and psychological landscapes, where stories unfold through fractured yet continuous narratives. It follows me quietly still adopts the handscroll’s extended format but shifts its mode of viewing: rather than being gradually revealed as the scroll is unrolled, the image unfolds through the viewer’s movement along the wall. Walking its length becomes a way of revisiting memory, as the past is encountered not as something fixed or distant, but as something carried forward and continually reinterpreted in the present.
Working in chalk pastel, Zearo builds a collective image from individual marks that evoke the pixel, each contributing to a larger visual rhythm. His compositions attend to the subtle tensions and connections between bodies, opening a spectrum of queer experience that spans the communal, personal and politically resonant. Fragile and tender, the work considers how longing and connection persist across time.
Zearo (b. 1996, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) lives and works in London, UK. In 2023, he received an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art. Selected solo exhibitions include: If I pass right by here, Linseed Projects, Shanghai, China 2024; in dust time, The Sunday Painter, London, UK, 2023. Selected group exhibitions include: The flesh of space, The Sunday Painter, London, 2025; Independent Art Fair, The Sunday Painter, New York, 2025; White Rabbit Lies, Solid Haus, Suffolk, UK 2025; Tangible, Subtitle Labs, London, UK, 2024; X Collection 202, Portrait of a Man, X Museum, Beijing, China, 2024; ART SG, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Marina Bay Sands, Singapore, 2024; YA!, 3812 Gallery, London, UK, 2023; Across & Over, HSBC HQ, London, UK, 2023; Tightrope, The Bomb Factory Art Foundation, London, UK, 2023; Wild is the Wind, Hew Hood Gallery, London, UK, 2023; Royal College of Art Degree Show, Truman Brewery, London, UK, 2023; Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Prize, 2023; Bloomberg New Contemporaries, South London Gallery, London, UK, 2022; Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, UK, 2022; Come One Come All, The Function Suite, London, UK, 2022; RAW-RCA WIP Show, Soho Revue, London, UK, 2021; Lingua Franker-A Shiftiest Show, HOXTON 253, London, UK, 2021; Set In Motion, G13 Gallery, Selangor, Malaysia, 2019; Got It For Cheap, Dateline Gallery, Colorado, USA, 2019. In 2022, his work was acquired by the Government Art Collection.
