Zackery Yao 姚子骅 (yáozǐhuá) (b. 2002, Ningbo, People’s Republic of China) is a multimedia visual artist, writer and scholar based in Houston, Texas. He received an International Baccalaureate Bilingual Diploma from United World College Changshu China before earning a BFA with Honors in Photography from Parsons School of Design, an MA in Arts Politics from New York University Tisch School of the Arts, and an MS in Media, Medicine, and Health from Harvard University. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Art History at Rice University.
Yao’s practice moves fluidly across photography, writing and scholarly research, grounded in a critical engagement with politics, cultural memory, and identity. Drawing from his own experience navigating queer identity within Chinese cultural contexts, his work resists singular narratives, instead foregrounding the complexity and intersectionality of lived realities. His artistic inquiries often center on themes such as health inequity, the geopolitics of violence, diasporic queerness, and the philosophical dimensions of war and image-making. Through this lens, Yao explores not only what is seen but how seeing itself is shaped by systems of power, trauma, and erasure.
His ongoing research, spanning the politics and theory of post-socialist photography, visual representation of cultural imperialism, and eco-feminist critique, informs his creative output, where Chineseness meets affective storytelling. In an era marked by de-globalization and fractured solidarities, Yao seeks to cultivate counter-spaces and time: visual, digital, and communal sites where mourning, memory, and resilience can be shared, rather than privatized. His images often linger in emotional interstices, exploring vulnerability as a mythology, but as a radical mode of being and a catalyst for political imagination. Yao’s projects have been featured in Vogue, ELLE, Grazia China and other publications. His work has been exhibited and supported by institutions including WhiteBox New York, Harvard University, Visual AIDS, the Shanghai Center of Photography (SCôP), NYSCA, and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs.