YiMiao Shih (b. 1985, Taiwan) is a London-based artist working across embroidery, drawing, and sculptural installation. She approaches stitching as an expanded form of drawing: thread functions as line, tension as pressure, and repetition as mark-making. Using a domestic sewing machine and hand-stitching, she produces what she describes as "embroidery-drawing" — the imitation of hand-drawn movement with stitched marks — a material language shaped through embodied movement and resistance.
Her work often centres on a recurring rabbit-like figure that navigates lived experience on her behalf. Through this motif she explores sense of comfort and the construction of home, reflecting her position between cultural contexts as a Taiwanese artist based in the UK. While visually playful, these narratives engage broader questions of identity, access, and emotional structures embedded in everyday environments.
Her first solo exhibition and six-month residency 'YiMiao Shih: Rabbrexit Means Rabbrexit', Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, London (2019), involved production of a series of new works in mixed media, drawing together YiMiao’s real-world observations of the nationalistic fervour, economic uncertainty and fragmentation of societal bonds brought about by Brexit.
In recent years, YiMiao's research has centred on how spaces are accessed, owned, or imagined, and how comfort is constructed within constraint. She referred to Emanuele Coccia's book "Philosophy of the Home" as point of reflection. These questions have gradually shifted from narrative depiction toward material enquiry. Recent projects (Wilton Way Gallery, 2025) and residencies (1B Window Gallery, 2024; Siliano Alto, 2026) have shifted her focus toward the relationship between stitched images and supporting structures: structure is no longer a neutral support, but an active, conceptual presence. Working with wood, metal, acrylic sheet, and spatial structures, she investigates how framing devices become active participants rather than neutral containers.
Group shows include: IMT Gallery, London (2026); Queen Alexandra’s House, London (2026); Outhouse Gallery, London (2026); Somerset House with Candida Stevens Gallery (2025); Paul Smith Albemarle Store (2024); Koppel X Gallery (2023); ING Discerning Eye Exhibition (2022); Mall Galleries, Sunday Times Watercolour Competition (2019); Poster Prize, London Transport Museum (2019); Seventeen Gallery (2019); Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts (2018); CICA Museum, Korea (2018); Street Road Artists Space, USA (2017); Saatchi Gallery, London (2016).