Mei Zhao is a Chinese-born, Sydney-based landscape artist. She grew up in Tianjin, China, and migrated to Australia in 1994.

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Her practice explores the history of Chinese migrants in Australian landscapes, with a focus on early Chinese market gardens across Sydney and regional NSW. Combining archival research and plein-air studies with material experimentation, Zhao traces how the history of Chinese market gardens is embedded within Australian cultivated landscapes, where man-made landforms and patterns leave imprints that reveal the ongoing interplay between human activity and natural processes, accumulating as layers of sediment within contemporary landscapes. Informed by her youth spent in agricultural labour before migrating to Australia, she approaches artmaking as a process of transforming her lived experiences of diverse landscapes through reimagined colours, forms, and materials.

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Zhao holds a Bachelor of Fine Art (2019) and a Master of Fine Art (2022) in Painting from the National Art School. She has presented numerous solo and group exhibitions and has been a finalist in several national art prizes. In 2023, she was awarded a Create NSW research grant and presented solo exhibitions including Liminal Places at Hurstville Museum & Gallery and Happy Valley at La Perouse Museum. These led to a commissioned solo exhibition, Remapping Erased Landscapes, at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery in 2025.

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Her most recent solo exhibition, Fishing for Golden Snappers (2026), was supported by the Northern Beaches Council Creative Grant. The work extends her ongoing research into early Chinese market gardens in Sydney’s Northern Beaches, including Manly Vale, Curl Curl and Brookvale, as well as historical Chinese fish-drying practices in the Broken Bay region between the 1850s and 1870s. Her work is held in private and institutional collections in Australia and the United States.