profile
https://meitao-qu.wixsite.com/works
Meitao lives and works between London and Beijing. Her practice is concerned with the production and circulation of images and the role they play in shaping discourses of gender, race, and nation. From costume to architecture, she is interested in how forms of visualisation operate as ‘props’ to stimulate imaginations. Having spent the majority of her life as a Chinese national in the UK, this experience has provided her with an intimate knowledge of what it means to be both native and immigrant, foreign and assimilated. Straddling this middle ground, her practice seeks to suture contradictory perspectives to highlight the misunderstandings that inform their conflict.
Storytelling and worldbuilding are key parts of her working process. She uses techniques of fictioning to create new meanings and associations that reflect on the conditions of our existing reality. In particular, she is interested in the fraught relationship between fact and fiction that is at the core of many if not all cultural and national myths through which we build our identities and understand ourselves. Traversing sculpture, moving image, video game, and Augmented Reality, her practice brings together the material and the virtual to contemplate the fissures between ideologies and realities.
She holds an MFA from the Ruskin School of Art (2021), funded by the Oxford-Kaifeng Graduate Scholarship, and an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art (2020). She was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2022, and recent exhibitions include ‘Adventures in Fact’, The Residence Gallery, London (2022) and ‘The Annual Metaverse Art @ Venice,’ Spazio Thetis, Venice (2022).