Biography
Milan Zou (b. 1997, China) is an artist specializing in oil painting, based in London, UK. She graduated from Parsons School of Design in 2020 with a major in Fashion Design.
Milan Zou’s practice explores the shape of inner stillness. Drawing from her background in fashion, she approaches painting as a method of construction—each canvas tailored like a garment, not to clothe the body, but to hold what cannot be worn: a system, a memory, a form of belief. In her work, clothing is not surface but structure—rigid, ritualistic, often hollow—serving as a vessel for spiritual architecture.
Her figures hover between materiality and absence. Faces drift into shadow, bodies dissolve into silence, yet something persists: a will, intangible yet forceful, pressing outward. Her paintings embody a quiet discipline, echoing the contemplative logic of a world beyond language. They are not reflections of identity or history, but meditations on the moment when a form forgets what it represents and becomes pure presence.
She paints not to depict, but to inhabit. Not to explain, but to endure.
Group Exhibitions
2024 - Destiny vs. Will, Sotheby’s Institute of Art. New York, USA
2024 - 7, theBlanc. New York, USA