Meitao Qu GBA

Meitao Qu is a UK-based Chinese artist working across sculpture, installation and digital media. Grounded in her personal experiences growing up in Shenzhen, the ‘model city’ of contemporary China’s economic and urban transformations, her work attends to the messy complexities of lived experiences that challenge official representations of progress and development. Taking urban landscapes, industrial infrastructure and domestic interiors as sites of inquiry, her practice explores how popular imaginations and dominant ideologies are inscribed through the material and architecture of everyday life. 

Working with ready-made objects and prefabricated assets, 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, reflecting on how histories and heritage are continually remade to satisfy changing narratives and consumption desires. Using adaptive and imitative processes of carving, casting and modelling, 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). Recent group exhibitions include Quench Gallery, Margate (2025); Public Gallery, London (2024, 2023); Ferens Art Gallery, Hull and South London Gallery as part of Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2022-2023). She has produced commissioned works for the Museum of Croydon (2023) and The Photographer's Gallery, London (2022), and 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). Recently, she undertook a year-long research fellowship at the Institute of Creative Technologies, Norwich University of the Arts (2024-5).