About — MILAN ZOU

Milan Zou (b. 1997, China) is a London-based artist working primarily in oil painting. Her practice explores the relationship between the body and garments, and how structure shapes human presence.

Trained in fashion design at Parsons School of Design, Zou repositions garments in her paintings not as signs of identity or consumption, but as frameworks that organise and contain the body. She deliberately retains a visual language associated with fashion, not to celebrate surface or appearance, but to reveal how the body is shaped and disciplined within contemporary systems.

Clothing is stripped of narrative and becomes a structural interface through which the body is both presented and constrained. In this reversal, garments no longer serve to display the body, but to expose its condition — revealing a tension between surface refinement and underlying pressure.

Her paintings are built through slow layering, where surfaces accumulate weight and stillness, allowing an internal presence to persist — held within, yet not fully defined by the form.