Mosa Zhao

About

Illustration with human figures against a gradient background with sun and cloud motifs. The figures are overlapped, with one central figure having a patterned body and a visible pregnant belly. — Icarus, 2022

Colorful drawing of human figures with patterned bodies, some with visible pregnant bellies, intertwined with each other and floral-like forms on a pink and yellow gradient background. — Maternity, 2022

Illustration of human figures with a large figure in the foreground with closed eyes and butterfly wings encompassing smaller figures within its folds. The background has cloud-like swirls and a gradient from pink to purple. — Butterfly, 2023

ARTIST STATEMENT

Zhao’s work centers around her perspective on life and death, her beliefs and her identity, losing herself and discovering it again. Every drawing is a process of quarreling with herself, creating worlds where she has an opportunity to feel safe to face herself. Her illustrations often allude to myths and creation stories, birth is a recurring theme in Zhao’s work. In Maternity, there is a union of human and nature, an important relationship to Zhao, displaying a pregnant woman with a human embryo, giving birth to beetles at the same time. And Icuras displays a birth that is not the birth of a person or a life, but the birth of a complex inner feeling. In Butterfly, she interprets the union of man and nature through impregnation, with the woman in the picture eating the eggs of moths so that they can enter her body and become part of her. Zhao loves to combine the sacred with things that people fear, which is what real ‘nature’ is to her.

BIO

Mosa Zhao (b. 2000) is an artist based in NYC. She received her degree in illustration from the School of Visual Arts in 2022. Through her drawing practice, Zhao honors her Asian identity, and explores conflicts between collective and personal realities and illusion. Her drawings serve as a place of refuge, collision, and quarreling with her worlds of order and chaos.