Artists

Meitao Qu

Press release

Public is pleased to present It's a small world (after all), a solo exhibition by London-based Chinese artist Meitao Qu, whose practice examines how urban architecture and lifestyle attractions shape the conditions that reproduce and disguise ideologies as collective fantasy. The exhibition presents a large-scale kinetic installation of an urban landscape, producing a miniature world that interrogates how ideologies materialise into objects, commodities, and the built environment. Taking global spectacles such as World's Fairs and consumer capitals like Disneyland as sites of inquiry, Qu examines how objects and symbols carry a visual economy that mobilises ideological narratives for popular consumption, reproduced under the guise of entertainment and play.

Having grown up in Shenzhen, the poster child of China's ‘Model Cities’, Qu’s childhood was nestled between four theme parks, connected by a monorail that traversed the boundary between fantasy and reality. Memorialising in miniature the country's historical splendour, amusement parks like Splendid China and Windows of the World tell tales of China’s social progress, situated alongside significant cultural monuments from around the globe. One world, one dream (2024) takes the form of a tiered urban landscape: glass houses, French colonial estates, Victorian style brownstones, and American Craftsman homes capture the essence of generic architectural idealisms. The structures are encircled by a sushi train ferrying a convoy of notable skyscrapers, and with it the ideals of progress and social mobility. The installation borrows its title from the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, referencing how global mechanisms of urbanisation unite the world in a perpetual state of redevelopment. At the top of the installation sits a dessert tray, holding inside a makeshift Cinderella style castle, yet supported by utilitarian constructions below. Like a snow globe, the centrepiece functions as a material representation of an imagined landscape and collective dream. It emerges from real narratives, but encapsulates the visual language of a fantasy in its very construction, offering a bite size fragment of a dream mass produced and prefabricated, both personal and ubiquitous.