Biography
Milan Zou (b. 1997, China) is a London-based oil painter. Trained in fashion design at Parsons School of Design, she transforms the structural language of fashion into a medium for philosophical inquiry and cultural critique.
For Zou, painting is not about representation, but construction—a garment that cannot be worn, a bodyless shell of a system, a suspended form of belief. She borrows fashion’s silhouettes and symbols not to perpetuate their aesthetic logic, but to place them in a critical context that exposes the rituals of control, empty desire, and institutional discipline they carry. Through oil painting, she confronts the systemic logic behind fashion—not as a commodity, but as a force that inscribes identity, obedience, and erasure. Clothing in her work becomes not an outer layer of consumption, but a hollow structure that bears the weight of historical regulation and spiritual will.
Her figures hover between presence and absence: faces fade into shadow, bodies stand still like monuments, at once present and dissolving. Form in her work sheds the need to represent and instead becomes meditative—an emptied order suspended in the state of forgetting.
Her paintings often begin with fashion sketches, yet quickly move beyond the surface. As she paints, fashion’s language returns—not as appearance, but as structure. Garments emerge as suspended relics of systems—sculpted, severed, and remembered. The human figure, meanwhile, lingers like a spiritual trace. Between form and formlessness, Zou paints as a response to systems of control, offering a quiet space for erased intentions to reappear.
Group Exhibitions
2024 - Destiny vs. Will, Sotheby’s Institute of Art. New York, USA
2024 - 7, theBlanc. New York, USA