Tony Zhao

Tony Zhao is a Brooklyn-based painter and designer whose work centers on texture as an emotional language. Operating between painting and printmaking, he is drawn to the industrious methods of image-making. Zhao’s process-driven practice revolves around sensitivity, transparency, and movement. Through layered, tactile compositions, Zhao distills the mundane—transforming surface into a site of resonance, where narrative emerges through material gestures and touch.

Born and raised in Beijing, China, Tony Zhao received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2024. While in China, he worked as an independent curator and educator at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art. Zhao has exhibited internationally, including at Union Street Gallery (Chicago), Gelman Gallery (Providence), and UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing). His recent solo exhibition Lake House at A/W Space in Nanjing, China explores interior spaces and personal objects encountered in his travels, reflecting on the melancholy of the vanishing American middle class from a traveler’s perspective, offering a meditation on space and memory.