Jacquie Meng’s works across painting, drawing, sound, and installation. Her work often incorporates figurative imagery alongside spiritual references, maps, and speculative landscapes, engaging with personal history and performed identities in cultural and social contexts. She has exhibited at Liverpool Powerhouse, Canberra Biennial, Stanley Street Gallery, and 4A Centre for Contemporary Art. Meng received the Guy Warren Emerging Art Prize in 2024 and the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship in 2022.

Smile is an exhibition that centres on a book, made in collaboration with Claire Grant, called Walking Around Looking For Teeth. The book features drawings by Meng and words by Grant. It is about two friends, a balloon and some footprints, who meet at a club and embark on a journey to find their bodies. It features passages from Lao Zi’s Dao De Jing, a foundational Daoist text. Meng’s drawings combine visual signifiers from maps, body charts, and game boards to form speculative landscapes which explore the potential of play, especially as a process of movement. The book considers the significance of remnants (teeth, coins, playing cards) as mundane objects which carry within them existential weight. Walking Around Looking For Teeth combines the object world with the self, and with friendship, and presents a world charged by the strange and continual processes which define internal and external meaning-making. Smile asks how drawing can make visible unseen flows of energy, while also formulating new understandings of being and identity in a global, technologically mediated world.