Zhao Yao (Chinese language: 赵要, born 1981 in Sichuan, China) is an artist in installations as well as performance, video and photography.

He has become an increasingly important figure in the emerging generation of the contemporary art world in China.

Zhao Yao’s works involve an extremely broad range of creative media, including installation, performance, video, painting, sculptures and many others, in which he forges a haptic dissonance, dislocating mundane and spiritual, sight and touch, at once ancient, contemporary, and futuristic, and manifesting the material energies of yet-to-be-named rituals.

His works display a sense of humor and confidence, tranquil yet full of tension, skillfully balancing between form and content.

Most recently, he was selected to participate in “Focus Beijing: the De Heus-Zomer Collection” at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Nederland, 2014), “Inside China” at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2014), and "Adventures of the Black Square:Abstract Art and Society 1915–2015" at Whitechapel Gallery (London, 2015).