How do social and interpersonal ties shape the female body? It is a question that London-based artist Tianle Zhao approaches through sculptural practice, using form as a means to express emotional and psychological experience. After receiving a Bachelor’s Degree in Interior Architecture at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2021, Zhao completed a Master’s Degree at the University of Westminster in 2024, since then she has taken part in eight exhibitions across the UK and Italy.
Working with soft materials including fibres, fabric and thread, often constrained through various means of binding and enclosure, Zhao’s work translates personal experience into ideas that reach toward the universal. A theme to which she returns is the idea that the structures of care and intimacy that shape us carry an equal potential for limitation as for growth and empowerment.
Many of Zhao’s works take this literally. Inside the Tightness (2025) presents flesh-like organs stitched in red wool thread and bound by strictures of chain and lace, adorned with charms, opals and metal decorations. The shapes look pained by their decoration as well as elevated by it. The work is informed, the artist has stated, by Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of becoming in The Second Sex (de Beauvoir 1949). Purposely leant against architectural structures, the positioning suggests that the object makes the most of its situation whilst trying to remain upright.
Quiet Burden I & II (2026) develop this territory further: objects whose shapes are given meaning by the structures that encase them. Quiet Burden I shows ingredients from Zhao’s East Asian heritage, red dates, red beans and glutinous rice, encased in wax. The resulting wax square suggests the preservative care that marks the construction, remembrance and continuality of familial relations that, as per burden, support and constrain multinational people like the artist. In Quiet Burden II Zhao places personal items in resin, further encased by a gilded metal cage whose vertical bars evoke the railings and gates of institutional childhood spaces. Suggesting that here again formative childhood protective structures constrain the artist through internal forms of regulation, the embodiment of control.
Both works reference the tension between Confucian ideas of relational selfhood through obligation and duty and post-structuralist thinkers such as Foucault and Bourdieu, who saw relational social structures as paradoxical in the way they simultaneously frame and constrain freedom. The second work in particular explores how internal regulation and normalisation shapes subjectivity, perhaps as profoundly as outward forces.
In these works, a quality of literalism, of directness, becomes a kind of proclamation: something or someone wanting to reveal itself while simultaneously struggling with the structures that formed it. On one level, the philosophical questions of structure, agency and determinism are legibly present; less immediately apparent are the concerns of various influential post-structural theorists, such as Bourdieu and his idea of the habitus — how structures are embodied, lived and evolve — regarding why societies of individuals change and the tense relations of power and choice that shape forces of inertia and evolution (Bourdieu 1990).
The central fault line of the structure-agency debate is whether people act as they do because of the structures that define them, or whether structures only exist through agents who might well act otherwise. Zhao’s recent work seems to suggest that, for her at this moment, the structures are more powerful than visions of change. This may be a recognition of personal reality, and it does not necessarily imply that she sees no possibility of change emerging from her bound and caged formal reality. It registers, however, as a hope rather than something evident in the work’s formal possibilities.
Her engagement with textural and material language invites comparison with Annette Messager, Gail Olding and Sarah Lucas, artists who each used non-standard materials to construct a female-centric world view that is at turns personal, domestic, transcendent and oppressed. Something of this territory is shared with a number of her London contemporaries: Monster Chetwynd’s use of handmade and abject materials to expose power through the carnivalesque; or Charmaine Watkiss, whose textile and sculptural work draws on the body as a site of cultural memory and longing. These are not precise analogies, but they suggest a milieu within which Zhao’s concerns find resonance. These are themes present in Zhao’s work, though at this stage they remain nascent rather than fully formed — and yet there are promising signs of development. Zhao cites the work of de Beauvoir and notably the concept of transcendence: the idea of becoming something beyond the strictures of domesticity and prescribed womanhood. This is a quality so apparent in the practice of Messager, Olding and Lucas, yet there are indications that in Zhao’s case these may find similar success. It is possible that Zhao intends audiences to feel compelled to kick apart (symbolically) the bound organ, smash the cage and shatter the balls of wax in liberating rebellion! A performative yet unfulfilled compulsion that reflects the ambiguity of contemporary life.
And it is here that the frisson of the work comes into focus, placing Zhao in a lineage alongside Messager, Olding and Lucas. These are artists whose practices maintained a deep emotional charge and yet, within that context, approached existential and feminist subjects with humour. They understood that laughter deflates power. Messager marshalled photographs and stuffed animals into darkly comic installations; Lucas deployed fried eggs, furniture and food in blunt sculptural self-portraits (Self Portrait with Fried Eggs, 1996) that used crude visual puns to reverse the male gaze (National Galleries of Scotland 2024); Olding’s sculptures, layered with critiques masked as visual puns, probe the point at which language collapses (Dellasposa Gallery 2019). In their different ways, each destabilised received hierarchies of sexual meaning, creating the sort of dialogue regarding the structures that produce and contain women. Does Zhao show the same resistant humour? Certainly, there are hints of the same resistant humour in Inside the Tightness, its soft, bulbous forms leaning toward the comic.Zhao’s work demonstrates a technical confidence that hints at greater works to come: larger in both scale and in subject. The pieces suggest a reach beyond the personal toward the transcendence promised both by her successes and by the trajectories of her philosophical influences. If Quiet Burden II is where Zhao currently lives, the tension visible in that work suggests she is already pressing against its cage.
Bibliography
Bourdieu, P 1990, The Logic of Practice, Polity Press, Cambridge.
de Beauvoir, S 1949, The Second Sex, Gallimard, Paris.
Dellasposa Gallery 2019, The Future is Female, Dellasposa Gallery, London, viewed 11 May 2026, https://www.artrabbit.com/events/the-future-is-female.
National Galleries of Scotland 2024, Self Portrait with Fried Eggs, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, viewed 11 May 2026, https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/76022.
Selected Exhibitions
Things Left Unsaid, Frevd Gallery, London, UK Sept 2025
Green Grammar, Nothing Holds on Its Own, Artsect Gallery & the Koppel Project, London, UK Oct 2025
Real Artists Sweat, Tiderip Gallery, London, UK Nov 2025-Jan 2026
Soft Architecture, Galerie Studio Home Awareness, Milan, Italy Dec 2025
Generative Metamorphosis, Isolart Gallery, Florence, Italy Jan 2026
The Stitch That Bit Back, Newark Works Bath, Bath, UK May 2026
Crèche Event, Créche Sessions, London, UK May 2026
WHISPERer, London Craft Week, London, UK May 2026
Collective Voices Exhibition 2nd Edition: Being-in-the-World, JustArt, Safehouse, London, UK May 2026
“Origins” Modern Art Exhibition, Mon Curates Art, London, UK Aug 2026
Images courtesy of the artist © Tianle Zhao.
This review is part of a supported series on emerging artists including Tianle Zhao.
Ex-London based reader of art and culture. LSE Masters Graduate. Arts and Culture writer since 1995 for Future Publishing, Conde Nast, Wig Magazine and Oyster. Specialist subjects include; media, philosophy, cultural aesthetics, contemporary art and French wine. When not searching for road-worn copies of eighteenth-century travelogues he can be found loitering in the inspirational uplands of art galleries throughout Europe.
