Tianyun Zhao: Gentle Rebellions in a Digital Age

Tianyun Zhao • 30 October 2025

London-based moving image artist and photographer Tianyun Zhao (Yano) creates works that drift between stillness and transformation, where memory becomes light and time turns tactile. Her practice navigates the intersections of image, perception, and identity, revealing how the digital age reshapes our sense of the self and the spaces we inhabit.

Drawing from Eastern philosophy and the rhythms of urban life, Zhao constructs visual worlds that exist between reality and imagination — contemplative yet quietly rebellious. Through the fusion of lens-based imagery, AI-generated fragments, and fashion-inflected aesthetics, she invites viewers into atmospheres where emotion and technology merge in a delicate equilibrium.


“I see my work as a dialogue between the visible and the invisible — a meditation on how we remember, and how we are remembered,” Zhao reflects.


Expanding the Language of Moving Image

Zhao’s practice has been presented internationally across galleries, festivals, and digital platforms. Her recent exhibitions include Field of Clarity at Photofusion Gallery (London, 2025), Broken Silence at Summerhall – In Vitro Gallery (Edinburgh, 2025), The Green Grammar Exhibition at art’otel Hoxton Gallery (London, 2025), and Fragments of the Past, Futures Unfolding at Normanou 3 (Athens, 2025). She also participated in Video Edition ArtIn as part of The Wrong Biennale (London, 2025), a globally recognised platform for digital and post-internet art.

Zhao’s work has appeared in publications such as Artist Talk Magazine (Issue 39, 2025) and Viridine Literary Issue 03 (UK, 2025), reflecting her expanding presence in both gallery and online contexts.

Stillness, Care, and the Invisible

Across projects such as They Stay When Planes Leave, By Street, and Pointed Away, Zhao turns her lens toward moments of quiet endurance and overlooked labour. A scavenger beneath a motorway, a ground worker guiding an aircraft — these figures inhabit the peripheries of visibility, becoming emblems of persistence in transient urban landscapes.

Her recent piece Journey/2.0 re-imagines the act of travel as a metaphor for consciousness, blending digital voice, AI synthesis, and poetic text to explore female authorship and narrative agency in contemporary image-making. The transformation of her own voice through technology becomes a gesture of reclamation — an evolution both personal and aesthetic.


A Philosophy of Gentle Rebellion

Zhao describes her practice as a form of “gentle rebellion” — a quiet defiance through sensitivity. In her works, time slows, and the unseen acquires presence. The interplay between organic textures and digital surfaces suggests that emotion can inhabit technology, and that tenderness itself can be a mode of resistance.

Her images invite contemplation rather than consumption, asking viewers to drift within them — to “zone out” in a space where movement and stillness coexist. Through this balance, Zhao redefines what moving image can mean in a post-digital world: not a spectacle of motion, but a meditation on being.

Discover more
🌐 www.tianyunzhaoart.com
📷 Instagram: @zhao.tianyun

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