Mandy Zhang Art presents Muscle Memory, a solo exhibition by Dylan Doe, curated by Ning Yu.
The show begins with a small but telling slip: a double-tap on a sketchbook page, performed instinctively, as if the paper were a touchscreen. It’s a glitch of habit — a gesture learned elsewhere — and it becomes the key to the exhibition.
From this moment, Muscle Memory unfolds as a meditation on how digital behaviours seep into the body. Not through futuristic implants or speculative tech fantasies, but through repetition: the quiet, almost invisible ways attention is trained, gestures are learned, and movements become automatic. Screens teach us how to touch, how to look, how to pause — until those instructions live in muscle rather than mind.
Doe’s paintings sit between fragmented portraiture and still life. Hands, hair, eyes and lips — sites of contact, sensation and recognition — appear as partial forms, assembled into loose, floating configurations. These bodies never quite resolve. Instead, they merge with imagined industrial elements that feel familiar yet slightly off, staged within spaces that resemble dioramas: intimate, contained, and faintly estranged.
Throughout the exhibition, the hand becomes an unstable symbol. Once associated with craft and intention, it now fractures into jittering fingers — duplicated, re-tasked, caught mid-gesture. Swipes, taps and half-touches suggest a body operating on autopilot, drifting between action and compulsion. The eye holds a different tension: often singular, often averted, it looks past rather than back, mirroring a world where seeing no longer guarantees encounter. Hair slips through the compositions like loose wiring, a soft trace hovering between organic presence and mechanical flow.
Doe’s process begins without planning. Unconscious drawing sessions generate rapid marks that function more as recall than design. Paint builds slowly on raw canvas through transparent layers and graduated priming, allowing the ghost of the initial sketch to remain visible — a residue of instinct and hesitation. Meaning accumulates rather than declares itself.
In Muscle Memory, intuition becomes both method and problem. It gestures toward freedom from over-determined systems, while quietly asking whether spontaneity can ever escape the habits already programmed into us. What looks automatic, after all, has been learned somewhere — and the body remembers.
Dylan Doe, Muscle Memory, 12th February – 27th March 2026 Mandy Zhang Art
Private View: Thursday 12th February 2026 6PM-8PM curated by Ning Yu
About the artist
Dylan Doe (b. 1980, London) is a London-based British artist who creates paintings that draw on the unconscious to explore post-humanist themes, including how the body evolves in relation to the objects and technologies it produces, the merging of organic and inorganic forms, and speculation on where this entanglement might lead. In 2023, Doe began a new chapter as a painter following a career spanning music, publishing, and design, shaped by collaborations across multiple industries.
Doe studied at the University of Manchester (BA, History), was awarded an AHRC scholarship to pursue an MA in Illustration at Cambridge School of Art (2012–2014), and later completed postgraduate teacher training at Goldsmiths, University of London (PGCE, Department of Design, 2018–2019). Recent exhibitions include Still Spinning (Albert Hall Mansions, London, 2024) and Latent Relics (Somers Gallery, London, 2025), with additional presentations in 2025 including Make Room LA (USA) and The Collector’s Residence, Larry’s List (Shanghai).
From 2005–2023, Doe’s work across publishing, design, and music included illustration projects for Thames & Hudson; commissions for clients such as BBC, The Fitzwilliam Museum, and CCTV China; print publication in DPI Art Quarter Magazine (Taiwan); and a parallel music practice as a composer and singer-guitarist, releasing work through labels including Sony BMG, Transgressive, LEX Records, and Akoustik Anarkhy.
About the Curator
Ning Yu is a London-based curator and art advisor with extensive international experience working with leading galleries, institutions, and private collections. Fluent in Mandarin, French, and English, she brings a global perspective to fostering connections between artists, collectors, and cultural organizations. She holds an MA in East Asian Art History from SOAS, University of London. She has held key positions across the art world, including representing Villepin Gallery and the Foundation for Art and Culture in the UK, where she led projects, developed strategic programs, and built partnerships with galleries and curators, as well as working at Frieze, where she played a central role in delivering international projects and VIP programs across London, New York, Los Angeles, and Seoul.
