Mei Zhao is a Chinese-born, Sydney-based artist working in the genre of landscape. She grew up in Tianjin, China, and relocated to Australia as a skilled migrant in 1994. Her practice is influenced by her past, firstly as a forced farming labourer in her teenage years at the end of the Cultural Revolution in China and then as an immigrant in Australia. These experiences inform her approach to landscape and communicate a merging cultural experience entangled with the local places through a multi-perspectival and topographical representation. 

 

Zhao’s current project explores the underrepresented history of early Chinese immigrants embedded within the Australian landscape, focusing on traces of the presence of 19th-century Chinese market gardens in Sydney and regional NSW. Combining archive research and plein-air landscape studies, she translates her experiences of living on different landscapes into expressive paintings and installations through gestural marks, layered colour, and material experimentation.

 

Zhao obtained a Bachelor of Fine Art in painting in 2019 and a Master of Fine Art in painting in 2022 from the National Art School (NAS). Zhao has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions. Zhao was awarded a research grant from Create NSW in 2023, which led her to develop a new body of work for a solo exhibition, Remapping Erased Landscape, currently showing at the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery (15th February - 25th May 2025). This exhibition is commissioned by the gallery and supported by Create NSW. Her works are held in St Vincent’s Private Hospital and private collections in Australia and the United States.