In an age of fast-moving technology, we might ask a question with a quiet anxiety: how do we remember, how do we understand who we are when reality feels so fluid? Can photographic and moving image practices watch us not merely as a record, but as spaces to consider, to make us ask who we are when the physical and the digital seem increasingly indistinguishable?
These are questions at the heart of the work of London-based artist Tianyun Zhao whose practice crosses moving image, stills and aesthetics. Born in China in 1997, Tianyun was trained in both China and the UK. Her practice is rooted in Eastern philosophy and contemporary digital culture, and her works span AI imagery, fragmented memory and surreal narrative to create spaces of reflection that are poetic, rebellious and quietly unsettling
The Silent Labour
One of Tianyun’s key works is the photographic series They Stay When Planes Leave, in which she turns her lens not on the romanticised act of departure, but on those who stay behind.
Here, Tianyun asks us to reconsider what it means to move. If flight is seen as freedom, then here are the photographs that remind us that motion is sustained by those who never leave. The series is a visual elegy for forgotten labour. She insists that meaning cannot be found only in what is physically travelled, but also in the dignified stillness. In the other, we find meaning. The photographs are quiet, but insistent. They ask us to notice dignity in stillness. They ask us to see labour not as background, but as presence.
At the same time, the work exceeds the airport scene to allude to deeper histories of belonging. It is those who stay that the work does not depict, but to whom it is owed: they are the memory, the continuity, the place, in which everyday rhythms of making and maintaining, preparing food, holding a home together, keeping people with it, are discernible but rarely visible in the spectacle of leaving. Tianyun’s photographs unveil the building structure of stay, to remind us that every leave is supported by people who do not leave. What stays can be just as formative as what leaves. It is this elegy for the unsung hands on which we depend that reminds us how necessary it is to see what is in place.
Another significant photographic series, Pointed Away, expands this investigation of stillness further still by focusing on the often invisible presence of Shanghai’s streets at night. In these images, a scavenger collecting fragile foam on a bicycle and an old street vendor sit beneath massive directional arrows. Pointing in directions of the future they’re shut out of, pointing away from the city’s centre, its consideration, its concern. Here, Tianyun is interested in the visual grammar of power and how those on the margins of society are inscribed within it unseen. We are asked to dwell in the quiet dignity of those who are stationary, to notice the lives that cross paths with these invisible systems wordlessly and to see where they are unseen.
If They Stay When Planes Leave is a lament for all the unseen who keep things moving, then Pointed Away is a reminder that stillness itself can be an architecture of exclusion, a reminder to see what is unseen.
Expanding the Notion of Movement
Tianyun’s They Stay When Planes Leave documents the labour of stillness, but Journey/2.0 broadens this scene of enquiry into the psychological and digital space. In this work, journeys are made, but there are no maps. Past and present collapse, digital bits split the body apart in space. But more than this, anchoring this work is a quiet radical gesture that is also an opportunity for artistic redress: through AI, the narrative voice (a male by default) has been recalibrated to female, an attempt to reclaim authorship over the absence of female agency in subject-telling. It rejects any form of linear narrative, instead, situating like memory itself: fractured, unstable, resonating with dissonant clocks and calendars. By confusing travel with perception and identity, Journey/2.0 is not only a work about movement, but also a work that is a reclaimation of voice in the digital age.
In these series, Tianyun translates gestures of personal emotions into something culturally resonant. Each resists the spectacle of narrative and instead dwells in gestures that feel familiar but estranged: gestures in which recognition is courted but not concluded. Tianyun also continues her inquiry into tradition and modernity. Whether obsessive or healing, become spaces of suspension in which the viewer is invited to dwell in gestures that resist commodification but resonate with deep cultural significance.
Mediums in Flux
Across her practice, Tianyun refuses to either fear or embrace technology. While her narrower practice moves fluidly between photography, moving image and experimental art, and often incorporates culture and technologies, her works tend to resist treating these as novelties or curios. She belongs naturally to a global dialogue on the moving image, but her roots in Eastern philosophy place her in a specific inquiry into impermanence, selfhood, and cultural fluidity. Her images are not declarations but questions. How do digital fragments reconfigure memory? How do ideas around Eastern philosophical thought adapt to a globalised, hyper-digital society? What happens when the self is split across the material and the immaterial?
Whether frozen on a camera screen or exhibited in a gallery, her works belong to a dialogue in which the imperative is to hold contradictions across scales without resolving them. To turn images into spaces in which to dwell. Her practice invites us to dwell in questions. To hold recognition without resolution. To court estrangement. To dwell in uncertainty. To recognise the unseen. To embrace the instability of identity as a space of possibility.
Across her photography and moving image, Tianyun builds what might be termed contemplative architectures. Rooms in which identity, memory, body and technology intersect. In a society in which immediacy and image saturation are dominant currencies, her works are an alternative. Tianyun’s strength as a maker of contemporary moving image is precisely this: her capacity to get us to slow down, to look, to dwell in those spaces in between. Inhabiting a space between the traditional and the modern, the material and the digital, her work resists easy classification. They are propositions, fragile and persistent, that prompt us to rethink not only the image, but ourselves.
