Du Meng：
Drift Orbit
Du Meng's first solo exhibition in Shenzhen grew out of a simple event in everyday life. While taking an unplanned detour from her intended route, Du Meng came across a stray cat and stopped to help it : an act of kindness that not only changed the course of one small life, but stirred in the artist a profound reflection on the relationship between the inevitable and the accidental. The exhibition space sits adjacent to a landmark Ferris wheel, whose fixed and predetermined orbit stands as a symbol of life's established patterns, prompting the artist to examine the nature of paths and trajectories, and to question the meaning and value of being "on track."
Du Meng has long placed great importance on individual memory and experience, and possesses a keen sensitivity for drawing meaning from the stories of everyday life. Her practice is rooted in personal lived experience — a mirror that reflects, with honesty and sincerity, the quiet observations and feelings embedded in the ordinary. Through this exhibition, viewers are invited to consider how the routines and cycles of daily life imperceptibly shape our destinies. In the making of this body of work, Du Meng also challenged the conventional process of glassblowing, breaking with the strict requirement that a blown piece be centered, and instead exploring the possibilities of deviation through the tilt of the body. This physical intervention becomes a questioning of technique, redefining the act of making: the "derailment" of art opens new perspectives and sensations, and sets in motion a broader conversation about what is inevitable.
The exhibition will serve as a platform for dialogue around choice and the contingency of life's trajectories, and invites each viewer to discover those seemingly insignificant yet quietly meaningful moments. Next time you find yourself walking down the street, try stepping up onto a roadside planter — the view and the feeling, you may find, are something altogether different. Du Meng's works attend to every small, heart-stirring instant in life: it is precisely these minor accidents, woven together, that trace the path of who we are and sketch the outlines of countless possible futures.
Artist
Born in 1986 in Beijing, Meng Du graduated from the Graphic Design program of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (B.F.A.) in 2008 and the Department of Glass and Glass Sculpture Program of RochesterInstitute of Technology (M.F.A.) in 2013. Currently, she is living and working in Beijing. Her work has continued to exhibit in China, Europe, and in the U.S.A., including Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2025); Shanghai Museum of Glass, Shanghai (2023); Genesis Foundation, Beijing (2022); Today Art Museum, Beijing (2021); The Delaware Contemporary, U.S.A. (2020); Fou Gallery, New York (2025/2022/2019/2016); Shanghai Museum of Glass, Shanghai (2018) and The International Exhibition of Glass Kanazawa at Shiinoki Cultural Complex, Ishikawa Prefecture Japan (2016). Meng’s solo show at Fou Gallery (2016) signifies the debut of her artistic career, marking her inaugural solo exhibition. She served as a residency artist at Seto International Ceramic & Glass Art Exchange Program, Seto, Japan (2021) and Aichi University of Education Glass Program, Aichi, Japan (2017). Her work has been widely featured in China Daily, People’s Daily, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Yitiao, Art China, CAFA Art Info, and other media platforms. She was invited to give lectures at TEDTalk (2024), YiXi (2020) and ROG International Art Project Online Symposium (2020). In 2016, she won the Honorable Mention for The International Exhibition of Glass Kanazawa (Kanazawa, Japan). In 2018, she won the 2018 Saxe Emerging Artist Award at 48th Glass Art Society Conference (Venice, Italy). She is the youngest artist who presented a solo exhibition at the Shanghai Museum of Glass. Her work is in the permanent collection of Burberry (Shanghai), Corning Glass Works (Shanghai), Shanghai Museum of Glass, Zhuzhong Collection (Beijing) and Victoria and Albert Museum (London).
Meng Du is interested in preserving memories and keeping a record of them so they do not fade overtime. With a natural instinct to extract meaning from narrative, she also wants to show memories in decay, as a way of memorializing them and showing the process of their slow disappearance from our consciousness. She incorporates the drawings and found objects, which come from her personal life experience into the surface treatment and imaging techniques of glass. To represent the nostalgic feeling and memories of certain time and places that she does not want to let go of.
Du Meng
