Meitao Qu
East Gallery Fellow
Research and Knowledge Exchange
Meitao Qu is a UK-based Chinese artist working across sculpture, installation and digital media.
Meitao Qu is an East Gallery Fellow, 2025-2026.
Taking urban landscapes, industrial infrastructure and domestic interiors as sites of inquiry, her practice explores how dominant ideologies and popular imaginations are inscribed through the material and architecture of everyday life. Grounded in her upbringing in Shenzhen, the ‘model city’ of contemporary China’s economic and urban transformations, her work attends to the messy complexities of lived experiences to reflect on official representations of progress and development.
During the fellowship, Meitao will develop a new body of work exploring how the rise and decline of offshore industries in the southern North Sea have shaped the wellbeing of onshore communities along the East Anglian coast. Working with virtual filmmaking and interactive sculpture, she is interested in the semantic surplus of models and miniatures as surrogates of existing and imagined structures, which generate speculative narratives about the world at large that expand our normative fields of view.
Drawing from decorative, architectural, culinary, and botanical art traditions, her work examines the plasticity of meaning that emerges between objects, their makers, and their users. Using ready-made objects and prefabricated assets, her practice assembles fragments of scaled worlds to produce referential encounters with objects and spaces that stage and shape the everyday.
Meitao holds an MFA from the Ruskin School of Art (2021), funded by the Oxford-Kaifeng Graduate Scholarship; an MA in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art (2020); and a BA in Fine Art and Art History, Goldsmiths College (2019).
Practice
Solo exhibitions include It’s a small world (after all), Public Gallery, London (2024); Paper Castles, Naebono Art Studio, Sapporo (2022); and Adventures in Fact, The Residence Gallery, London (2022).
She was an artist-in-residence at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka (2024); Turf Projects, Croydon (2023); S-AIR, Sapporo (2022); and Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2021-2), and has produced commissioned works for the Museum of Croydon (2023) and The Photographer’s Gallery, London (2022).
Recently, she undertook a year-long research fellowship at the Institute of Creative Technologies, Norwich University of the Arts (2025) and is a recipient of the Gilbert Bayes Award 2026, awarded by the Royal Society of Sculptors, London.