MeSo Ventures
Mengmeng Zhang

Mengmeng Zhang

London / China — Painting

Zhang's paintings begin with feeling rather than plan — colour chosen intuitively, marks made in response to psychological states rather than observed reality. Her subjects exist in an ambiguous middle ground: stylised figures that are simultaneously specific and universal, caught in moments of transition, displacement or quiet suspension. The fragmentation of living experience — of being between cultures, between memory and the present, between the self one was and the self one is becoming — runs through every aspect of her practice. Having studied across three continents — at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, Camberwell College of Arts in London, and the Slade School of Fine Art at UCL — Zhang's work carries the accumulated sensibility of multiple art education traditions. Her MFA at the Slade, completed in 2025, marked a significant development in her practice, deepening her engagement with the materiality of painting and the philosophical questions that underpin it. She is the winner of the 2025 Almacantar Studio Award.

Mengmeng Zhang (b. 1997, Jiangsu, China; based in London) is a painter whose intuitive practice spans acrylic, gouache, ink and pastel to explore memory, displacement and fragmented realities. Working at the intersection of psychogeography and phenomenology, Zhang creates layered compositions that trace the displacement between memory and the present — between inner emotion and outer environment. Her stylised characters and intuitive colour choices embody moods, actions and fictional experiences drawn from personal reflections on everyday life.

Education

  • 2023–2025 — MFA Painting, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, London, UK
  • 2019–2021 — MA Fine Art Painting, Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London, London, UK
  • 2015–2019 — BA Digital Publishing, China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China

Awards & Residencies

  • 2025 — Almacantar Studio Award
  • 2024 — Runner-up, Bloomsbury Festival New Wave Fine Art Competition
  • 2024 — Shortlisted, The Hari Art Prize
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Selected Works

No works currently listed for this artist.

Exhibition History

Solo Shows

  • 2024Out of Place, Bonian Space, Beijing, China
  • 2025Illusion, A Single Piece Gallery, Sydney, Australia

Group Shows

  • 2025Real Artist Sweat, Tiderip, London, UK
  • 2025Everything under the sun, Arts & Collections, Shanghai, China
  • 2025Line Shifu and Bakery Shifu, Small-Time Project, London, UK
  • 2025Pareidolia, Mandy Zhang Art, London, UK
  • 2025Moving Principle, Arusha Gallery, London, UK
  • 2025Between Worlds, MeSo Ventures at The Hilight, Battersea, London, UK
  • 2024Bloomsbury Festival New Wave Art Prize, City Lit Gallery, London, UK
  • 2024Out of the woods, Mandy Zhang Art, London, UK
  • 2024ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair, Shanghai, China
  • 2023Art on a Postcard, Soho Revue, London, UK
  • 2023Shadows We Cast, The Koppel Project Station, London, UK
  • 2023Floating, The Bomb Factory, London, UK
  • 2022Selects: Vol. 2, London Paint Club, London, UK
  • 2022Intimacy, Fitzrovia Gallery, London, UK
  • 2022Flux, Espacio Gallery, London, UK
  • 2021UNMUTE, Copeland Gallery, London, UK

Press & Publications

  • Featured artist, Issue 30–31, ArtMaze Mag — 2023
  • 'The Space Between', London Paint Club — 2022