Mengting Zhuo

About

Mengting Zhuo is a Chinese-born, London-based performance and sound artist. She is the artist behind TIME, the three-scent collection of Past, Now and Future that she made for aequill while the house's artist in residence in 2023 and 2024.

Zhuo was born in Guangzhou in 1990 and has lived in London since 2015. She studied literature and critical theory, played in indie bands, and took an MA in Performance Making at Goldsmiths, University of London, which she finished in 2016. Her work covers live performance, participatory installation and concerts, and returns to presence and liveness: things that cannot be captured or sold. From 2022 she has also performed sonic acts and written site-specific scores for Cafe OTO in London, Frieze London, Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong and MAO Torino in Italy. She also teaches as a visiting lecturer at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and at London College of Communications, and co-hosts a Chinese-language podcast on contemporary performing arts.

For aequill she treats perfume as one more medium for time, memory and presence. TIME is built on a Daoist idea of time as a continuous flow rather than a line, so each scent is a landscape, not a story: Past is a landscape of memory, Now is the fleeting present, and Future is an open space of potential. Every bottle ships with a playful original score that she wrote, packed at random from a set of twelve, so no two buyers know which instruction they will get.

Her scents read as ideas first and recipes second. They are quiet, unhurried and meant to accompany the wearer rather than to impose a mood.