Julia Zhao

Lives and works in London, UK

Artist statement

My background is in art and technology, theatre and stage design, and I still think in terms of space, bodies and time. What has changed is how I build the environment: with AI film, MetaHumans, VR and real-time AI agents, alongside objects, sound and even smell. These tools interest me less as spectacle than for how they behave. Generative AI works through probability, digital humans are both present and absent, and VR lets a viewer occupy several positions at once. I use these qualities to mirror the uncertainties already in the material. So I rarely keep audiences at a distance. In my installations they sit inside the rooms of a life being turned into data, question the digital ghosts of Heisenberg and Bohr, or step into a dreamer’s perspective. Each encounter produces a slightly different work, and the viewer helps write its story. A body sliced into 27,000 cross-sections and archived as medical data. A 1941 conversation between two physicists that history has never settled. A Tang Dynasty scholar who lives a whole lifetime in a dream beneath a locust tree. The figures I return to are caught where a life becomes an image, a dataset, or a story told by others, and where its ownership begins to blur. I draw on medicine, physics, Kunqu opera and Western drama because each has its own way of handling what cannot be fully known. Placing them side by side, I hope to make body, history and memory feel unfinished again: still shifting, still open to being reimagined.

Artwork