by Joana Alarcão

"Warmth and constraint, freedom and control, become inseparable conditions of becoming."

The centrepiece of Tianle Zhao’s sculptural practice, an ensemble of unorthodox, soft textile and wax sculptures investigating the boundaries of female subjectivity and relational ethics, is a formless, pink sculpture. Composed of a mass of flesh-toned forms compressed and bound by aluminum wire and chains (and a few red stitches), the London-based Chinese artist’s elaborate sculpture, Inside the Tightness (2025), radiates both Magdalena Abakanowicz’s psychologically charged bodily presence and Sheila Hicks’s textile-based materiality lineage. As a sculpture depicting how social and familial systems regulate female identity, the material becomes both restriction and elevation, resembling a biologically organic, invertebrate form. Yet the cold atmosphere of the aluminium wires and the soft, visceral red stitches give it a familiar yet unsettling appearance. And that is the point. As the work analyses the female body through the lenses of social relations, it is bound to be a formless sculpture arousing discomfort rather than existing outside of it, directly linking to the constant overlapping contemporary social structures, the contracting roles of historical family duties, and the cultural manifestations of independence. It demands attention rather than shying away from a more confrontational stance.


Inside the Tightness, 2025 (installation view). Courtesy of the artist.

Two more recent artworks, Quiet Burden I (2026) and Quiet Burden II (2026), appear at a glance to be aesthetically led in a different direction. These 10- and 20-cm rectangular wax and resin sculptures continue the formal aesthetic of previous works, examining the ambivalence of care, but they function within Zhao’s practice as more personal looks into how it can shift into mechanisms of control, weight, or suffocation. In Quiet Burden I (2026), the artist encases food items provided by her parents in wax, reflecting care that carries invisible pressure within Chinese culture. Food signifies tenderness that circulates through material gestures rather than through physical or verbal affection. Thus, exposing the balance between the acts of care and the tension that they can hold when they become dependency or invisible pressure.


Quiet Burden I (2026). Courtesy of the artist.

“Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s writing on the circulation of affect within social relations, the work reflects on how intimacy, responsibility, and vulnerability become materially sedimented over time. The preserved food becomes a fragile structure of care—holding tenderness, weight, and constraint simultaneously," the artist explains.

Conversely, Quiet Burden II (2026), through the same visual narrative, embeds personal school-related objects (such as a tie and headphones) in resin within a rigid metal frame inspired by the artist’s adolescence within the Chinese school system and its iconography (school gates). Making the containment inherent in institutional order visible, which can be productively read alongside Andrea Fraser’s critique of how subjectivity is disciplined in systems. They both investigate different faces of the same coin; one is family dynamics, and the other is institutional boundaries, with both prevailing as systems of care and education but also serving to slowly shape us into specific moulds of existence.


Quiet Burden II (2026). Courtesy of the artist.

This research area is vital to Zhao’s narratives of care and subjectivity. Inspired by her background in interior architecture, the artist treats sculptures as forms of “spatial thinking", investigating how emotional states are shaped, contained, and restrained through material and spatial structures. Intentionally drawing conceptual, visual, and spatial narratives that serve as both a physical and psychological framework. Material in the artist’s practice is used very deliberately and effectively, drawing contrasts between soft, responsive, and tactile materials (fibre, fabric, wax, cotton, and resin) that can be subjected to solidification, binding, or enclosure and rigid frameworks made of timber, aluminium wire, or metal. This material tension is a clear metaphor for the complex interplay of care and control.

The use of wax and resin is also critical to discuss the artist’s investigation into the ambivalence of care, as they relate to preservation and “emotional sedimentation". The artist treats materials as temporal archives that record our personal experience over time, and then, using the solidification aspect of the material as control (preserving family photography in the work Soft Weight or childhood items in Quiet Burden II), by using these materials to immobilise and fix objects in place, the artist mirrors intimacy and responsibility and how they can become mechanisms of emotional regulation. And you can see this narrative through all the artist’s practice, where the material becomes the spokeswoman for the narratives being investigated.


Soft Weight,2025 (installation view). Image courtesy of the artist

Another crucial aspect of Zhao’s practice is the deep intellectual and cultural framework that informs her visual choices. Her work is a dialogue between Western feminist theory and East Asian social philosophy, relying on Confucian relational ethics and theoretical dialogues of Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of “becoming” to create an argument for female subjectivity. As a result, the artist references heavily the Classic of Filial Piety and the idea that the self is formed through family networks rather than individual autonomy. In contrast, Zhao states that female identity is constructed by social roles, using Michel Foucault’s theories to illustrate how institutional discipline (like the school system) is internalised as a form of “protective” regulation. In any case, Zhao’s practice persuasively shows us how we are shaped by the structures we inhabit, suggesting that we cannot exist outside of the relational and institutional systems that define us.

Find more about the artist here.