Artists

Mei Zhao is a Chinese-born, Sydney-based landscape artist.

She grew up in Tianjin, China, and migrated to Australia in 1994. Her practice is shaped by lived experience, including forced farming labour during the late Cultural-Revolution and her subsequent life as an Australian’s migrant. These histories inform her approach to landscape as a site of exploring cultural transformation through multi-perspectival and topographical representations.

Zhao’s current work investigates underrepresented histories of early Chinese migration, focusing on traces of nineteenth-century Chinese market gardens across Sydney and regional NSW. Her process combines archival research with plein-air studies, translated into expressive paintings and installations through gestural mark-making, layered colour, and material experimentation.

Zhao holds a Bachelor (2019) and Master of Fine Art (2022) in Painting from the National Art School. She has exhibited widely, including a commissioned solo exhibition at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery 2025 and was awarded a Create NSW research grant in 2023.

In Residence at Bundanon

During residency, I will develop a landscape study focusing on the river flats of the Shoalhaven River near the residency site. Working directly in the landscape, I will create mixed-media paintings and drawings through open-ended, experimental approaches. Daily engagement with the riverbank will allow me to respond to changing light, colour, and form, as well as to traces left by plants, insects, animals, and human activities. Using found materials and gestural mark-making, the project aims to expand my practice beyond studio-based methods and create a new body of work that embodies my lived experience of Bundanon’s natural and cultural landscape.