Bio
Meishan Zhao is a London-based artist, born in Beijing, China. Working across painting, sculpture, and installation, her practice explores relationships between material, body, and space, with a particular interest in instability, dwelling, and embodied experience. She received a BA in Fine Art from UAL and is currently studying at the Royal College of Art. Shaped by experiences of living and working across different cultural contexts, her practice considers how ideas of place, belonging, and orientation are continually formed and negotiated.
Statement
Meishan Zhao’s practice investigates dwelling as a provisional and relational condition shaped through encounters between bodies, materials, and space. Working across painting, sculpture, and installation, she explores how instability, support, weight, surface, and spatial tension can be experienced materially rather than represented as fixed subjects.
Her work is informed by experiences of movement across different cultural and domestic contexts, which have shaped an ongoing interest in belonging, orientation, and the ways bodies negotiate changing environments. Through processes of placing, balancing, supporting, assembling, and adjustment, Zhao approaches making as a means of examining how relationships are formed through physical dependence and spatial negotiation.
Materials are treated as active participants within this process, carrying their own weight, resistance, vulnerability, and capacity for transformation. Rather than resolving these tensions, Zhao allows forms and arrangements to remain provisional, creating situations in which support and instability coexist.
Through these temporary material and spatial relationships, her practice considers how dwelling may emerge not through permanence or fixed belonging, but through repeated acts of negotiation, adaptation, and relation.