Biography
Milan Zou (b. 1997, China) is a London-based oil painter with a background in fashion design from Parsons School of Design. Her practice focuses on the structural entanglement between systems of discipline, the body, and states of interiority—translating the language of fashion into a painterly response to social control.
Working exclusively in oil, Zou often begins with fashion sketches, gradually stripping garments of their function and trend, reconfiguring them as residual containers of ideology. The bodies in her paintings are no longer agents of emotion, but vessels shaped by institutional structures—faceless, compressed, and burdened by invisible pressure.
Her artistic philosophy merges Eastern modes of insight with Western structural critique. Rather than conveying clear narratives, she constructs a visual tension between erasure and emergence, silence and presence. Resistance in her work is not declarative, but structural—an ongoing signal of existence beyond language.
Group Exhibitions
2024 - Destiny vs. Will, Sotheby’s Institute of Art. New York, USA
2024 - 7, theBlanc. New York, USA