Biography
Milan Zou (b. 1997, China) is a London-based oil painter with a background in fashion design from Parsons School of Design. Working primarily in oil, she transforms the structural language of fashion into a philosophical visual inquiry—exploring how systems of power shape identity through clothing, discipline the body, and leave ideological traces in form.
Her process often begins with fashion sketches, gradually detaching garments from function and appearance, reconfiguring them as bodiless, structural shells. Her figures are rendered faceless, compressed, and monumentally still, embodying a language of quiet endurance. Rather than depicting emotion, she allows the body, in its tension and restraint, to register the embedded weight of invisible systems.
Set against blackened grounds, her paintings open up a space of contemplation. Subtle gestures within silence become cues to an interior realm. Zou responds to structure through image, letting resistance unfold not as confrontation, but as a slow emergence toward a meditative mode of seeing and being.
Group Exhibitions
2024 - Destiny vs. Will, Sotheby’s Institute of Art. New York, USA
2024 - 7, theBlanc. New York, USA