Zhuofan(Mika)Tao

Artist profile picture
A city street scene showing digital billboards at a bus stop, where fashion posters with floral patterns are animated through augmented reality, blending with real pedestrians.

About

My work begins where repetition loses meaning—where the habitual slips, and something unspoken surfaces. I am drawn to the microtextures of the everyday, to quiet rituals and gestures that register tension, containment, or the trace of something withheld.

Through unstable materials, shifting images, and spatial arrangements, I explore the porousness of bodies and environments—how forms hold, release, or remember. The surface, especially, recurs: as skin, as screen, as boundary. A fragile interface where inner and outer blur, where control becomes tactile, and care carries the weight of surveillance.

I am interested in the aesthetics of slight discomfort. In atmospheres where something almost happens, or just did. Where softness is not a comfort, but a pressure. Where stillness vibrates.

There is no fixed center—only arrangements, frames, reflections. I see the work as a site, not a message. A place to linger in the in-between: between the self and its image, between presence and echo, between what is shown and what cannot be touched but is already felt.