Announcing the East Gallery Fellows 2025-2026
Norwich University of the Arts is pleased to announce the selected awardees of this year’s East Gallery Fellowships.
We are excited to announce that Meitao Qu and Raheel Khan have been selected as the recipients of the East Gallery Fellowships 2025-2026, appointed through public open call.
The selection panel included representatives from Norwich University of the Arts, the East Gallery Curator, as well as external advisors John Kenneth Paranada (Curator of Art and Climate Change at the Sainsbury Centre), Gillian Fox (Assistant Curator at Hayward Gallery Touring), and Rachel Kent (Director of Exhibitions at Victoria Miro).
Launched in 2023, our East Gallery Fellowships provide a significant opportunity for creative exchange and experimentation embedded in the pioneering research culture of Norwich University of the Arts.
The Fellowships are non-prescriptive and focus on supporting creative practitioners to research and develop an innovative research-led creative project that will result in a high-quality exhibition at East Gallery.
About the Fellows
Meitao Qu
Meitao Qu is a UK-based Chinese artist working across sculpture, installation and digital media. 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.
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.
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). 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).
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.
Raheel Khan
Raheel Khan (b. 1992, Nottingham) is a London-based artist and composer working across installation, performance, drawing and text.
His practice considers the construction of environments where sound and objects converge, forming landscapes that reflect on human routine, design infrastructures and their containment of communal memory.
Khan approaches physical sites as collaborators, allowing architectural, material, and social conditions to actively inform and decide the work. Guided by a compositional and research-led framework, Khan works with the concept of machine, devotion, and the acoustic to explore themes of home, policy, trade, time-loops, mysticism, religion, noise and frequency.
Sound is treated as a resonant and material form within the gallery, working across electroacoustics, amplified, and vibrational sensibilities. Sculptural installations and assemblages are often produced using reclaimed materials sourced through local contexts and circulation, and are staged to question our relationships to products, belongings, and object histories.
Khan is the 2026 Fluxus Projects Magnetic Laureate, in partnership with Bétansalon, and the current recipient of the Goldsmiths Alumni Award. In 2024, he received the Almacantar Studio Award for his MFA degree show and was shortlisted for the Arts Foundation Futures Award in 2025. He previously graduated with a BA in Economics from Manchester Metropolitan Business School.
Recent exhibitions and performances include Camden Art Centre, London (2025); Goldsmiths CCA, London (2025); Bold Tendencies, London (2025); Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham (2025) and Auto Italia, London (2025).
