“Quiet rebellion” means resisting numbness—not through confrontation, but through awareness and tenderness. I want to create spaces that invite viewers to slow down, to listen, and to question how they perceive time and presence.”

In Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975), we are guided through a 3-hour-long documentation of what women’s domestic chores look like in real life and, for the audience's delight, in real time. The protagonist slowly peeled potatoes, washed dishes, and made beds, developing a visual take on the politics of slowness. Acclaimed by critics as radical feminist video art, not for its subject matter but for its filming format, the work's refusal to compress and speed through the motions and takes, its deliberate pacing, and its sheer duration delivered a simple statement: viewers will pay attention.

Against this backdrop, fifty years later, artists continue to follow Akerman’s footsteps. Taiwanese artist Tsai Ming-liang similarly extends this practice through minimal narratives and long takes. Creating a unique method called 'slow walks'- ten-minute shots of a monk traversing city streets, holding static shots for ten minutes, quite demanding audiences to recalibrate their perception. This deliberate act of slowing down is termed by theorist Jonathan Romney the new slow cinema or contemplative cinema, a mode of quiet rebellion: if our current fast world and capitalism demand extreme fast attention and perpetual motion, the artists insist on an almost unbearable stillness.

China-born, London-based visual artist Tianyun Zhao (Yano) works within this theoretical tradition but through moving image and still visuals, with a body of work that spans video art, lens-based media, fashion aesthetics, and AI-generated narratives. 'I hope my work encourages a form of still reflection in an age of constant motion,' she explains. Zhao's unique perspective emerges from her personal experiences of growing up in Shanghai and now living in London, informed by 'traditional Eastern sensibilities-such as restraint, balance, and the idea of impermanence.' Her stillness and contemplation operate through 'awareness and tenderness': not the confrontational gestures of earlier political art, but patient attention to 'vulnerability, solitude, and resilience-universal yet often unspoken human states'.

In THEY STAY WHEN PLANES LEAVE (2019-2024), the artist asks, “What if the true motion of a journey begins before the wheels leave the ground?” focusing on the unseen steady labour surrounding airport workers, who “sustain the movement of others yet remain unseen themselves.” This collection of photography, influenced by artist Yang Fudong - whose poetic black-and-white imagery and contemplative rhythm profoundly shifted her focus to using moving images as reflection rather than narration - moves beyond spectacle. Instead, it fosters a steady presence, composed with a muted tone and careful framing, capturing workers mid-gesture to create what the artist calls emotional minimalism. 

This approach echoes WORKERS LEAVING THE FACTORY (1995) by Harun Farocki, where the camera documented industrial labour, making visible what economic systems render invisible. Yet, Zhao does not implement a didactic, analytical stance. Rather, documentation is contemplative. This collection doesn't seek dramatic takes or spectacle; instead, it becomes like a second lens, as if we are there, witnessing the quiet everyday moments that make our lives run without our awareness.

In another work, Zhao moves from documentary observation to digital construction. OBSESSED (2024), a moving image work, focuses on two symbolic beings—a jellyfish and a butterfly - to explore “emotional detachment and internal conflict". This piece, aesthetically rooted in Dazecore aesthetics – a post-internet visual language of hyper-saturated, dream-like imagery – creates what theorist Laura Marks terms 'haptic visuality' as the jellyfish's translucent essence and the butterfly's delicate movements appeal to embodied and tacitly multisensory experiences that allow a more intimate connection between viewers and screen. 

The jellyfish and the butterfly express an encounter between two emotional extremes: isolation and yearning, and numbness and restlessness, where their meeting dissolves boundaries between self and other. Using the act of the butterfly's self-sacrifice and compassion for the jellyfish, this work contemplates love and self-redemption while “questioning how, in our hyper-curated modern lives, we often confuse illusion with emotional truth.” But it refuses easy answers and instead constructs a 'contemplative world' where vulnerability and connection emerge through visual rhythm rather than narrative resolution.

Also, within the same framework stands the video work JOURNEY/2.0 (2025), where Zhao reflects on another contemporary take: the integration of AI technology in moving image creation. In this work, through AI-generated female voices, the artist narrates her inner reflections, questioning how gender and authorship shape emotional storytelling. This position integrates Zhao's practice within the contemporary moving image theory, post-cinema, where computational process becomes a creative collaborator and questions image-making after cinema's technological and cultural dominance ^_ becoming a tool for exploring consciousness and identity. In the same line, here AI becomes a liberating tool and a mirror, allowing space for reflection on our own stigmas and rooted stereotypes, enquiring whether, by machines speaking our thoughts, it still remains distinctly human.

“By letting an artificial voice express my own thoughts, I questioned how gender and authorship shape emotional storytelling,” Zhao explains. “For years I instinctively wrote male protagonists, influenced by narratives told from male perspectives; when I changed the voice to female, nothing felt out of place, yet it revealed how my own imagination had been conditioned.”

Despite the different aesthetics and mediums, the artist develops a visual essay that leads us through the systematic, unseen labour and emotional spaces that go unnoticed due to our constant need for motion. This line of inquiry connects with what critics call essay film, a mode that focuses on deep reflection rather than narrative, where stillness, for Zhao, is framing, as it doesn't oppose motion but instead reveals it. Through her emotional dazecore fantasy and her moving image work, she does not focus on the lack but rather on the framework that already permeates our inner and outer world, inviting us to question, stand still and just pay attention. The airport worker and the isolated jellyfish are the different faces of the same coin. One is material and the other emotional, but both go unnoticed. 

The visual language of Zhao has been shown at multiple exhibitions and screenings, such as Video Edition ArtIn (2025) The Wrong Biennale Pavilion, London, UK; Artist Talk Exhibition London (2025) at Espacio Gallery, London, UK; Field of Clarity (2025) at Photofusion Gallery, London, UK; Broken Silence, Summerhall (2025), In Vitro Gallery, Edinburgh, UK; Emerging Art Beat Exhibition (2025); Le Grange Gallery, Melbourne, Australia and much more. Her achievements also include awards and recognitions, such as being a finalist at the Digital Media Festival for “Roomies” and an official selection for Lift-Off Filmmaker Sessions by Lift-Off Global Network. Her work stands at the tipping point of particular dualities: navigating Shanghai and London perceptions, analogue observation and AI-generated narratives, and documenting labour and spiritual metaphors. This exploration of contrasting aesthetics and frameworks gives her space to develop what she terms ‘contemplative worlds' across these binaries. Her forthcoming work, DO MACHINES ZONE OUT ON THE TUBE?, a moving image exploring the human element within London's transport system and the consciousness of machines, promises to examine the blurred boundary between observation and automation, giving us another layer within Zhao's perspectives.

Regardless of the subject matter or medium employed, Zhao’s underlying message remains consistent: in an age of constant extreme and engineered distractions, sustained and persistent attention to the overlooked can become a quiet rebellion, both an aesthetic method and an ethical stance.

Learn more about the artist here.

Cover image:

They Stay When Planes Leave. Digital photography, 12 × 12 cm/ 8.1 × 10.9 cm (image size), A5 paper. By Tianyun Zhao.

Images courtesy of Tianyun Zhao.