Tieyuan Zhou
Adelaide, South Australia

Tieyuan Zhou is a contemporary artist and researcher based in Adelaide whose practice explores memory, language, and material as intertwined forms of identity. Born in China and now living in Australia, Zhou’s work investigates the experience of migration, mother-tongue loss, and the quiet transformations that occur across cultures and places.

Her practice spans printmaking, ceramics, and installation, often combining fragile and transient materials such as paper, porcelain, and cement to reveal how language and belonging can be both eroded and reformed. After returning from China in 2025, Zhou’s renewed encounter with her cultural origins deepened her understanding of heritage and displacement, allowing her to reinterpret past works through a more nuanced lens of cultural continuity and change.

Zhou’s approach is both conceptual and material, shaped by her interest in the gestures of making as a form of translation. Her process often involves repetitive touch and surface inscription, where the act of layering, erasure, and repair becomes a metaphor for linguistic and emotional adaptation.

Zhou completed her Bachelor of Contemporary Art (Honours, First Class) at the University of South Australia. Her honours research centred on decolonising frameworks and non-Western methodologies in artmaking, culminating in a body of work that examined the intersections between cultural memory, language loss, and material fragility.

Her work has been presented in exhibitions across South Australia, including projects with Helpmann Academy, Laneway Print Studio, and community-based initiatives such as the Stobie Pole Project. Recent series, including Déjà vu and Glimpse, reflect her ongoing exploration of the poetic and tactile relationship between personal narrative and collective history.