Milan Zou (b. 1997, China) is a London-based artist working primarily in oil painting.
Trained in fashion design at Parsons School of Design, Zou first approached clothing as a way of understanding people and the social forces that shape them. Her practice has since expanded into a broader exploration of how bodies, relationships and identities are formed through structures of gender, class, family and contemporary culture.
Combining the visual language of classical painting with contemporary figurative metamorphosis, Zou creates figures that often appear suspended between the human, the sculptural and the puppet-like. Garments merge with bodies, gestures remain psychologically ambiguous, and familiar relationships resist fixed interpretation. Through slow layers of oil paint and restrained compositions, she creates images in which meaning is deliberately left unresolved.
Rather than using painting to illustrate social structures, Zou is interested in returning uncertainty to things we define too quickly. Her work asks what remains of a person after the world has shaped, classified, and named them, searching for a sense of life that cannot be fully contained by identity, language or form.