We are delighted to announce Jeremy Chih-Hao Chuang & Eliza Bennett as the selected artists for the GRAIN 2026 Bursary award.

About Jeremy Chih-Hao Chuang:
Jeremy Chih-Hao Chuang is a Taiwanese artist based in London, UK. Chuang holds a master’s degree at the Royal College of Art. He focuses extensively on the interrelationship between home and self-identity from an autobiographical perspective, which he derived into a subjective language that uses photography to engage in visual contemplation. With his studies and art, he predominately concentrates on the integration of interdisciplinary media, sculpture and installations, specific bodies and spaces with photography.

For the bursary award Jeremy will develop his project “Ephemeral Intimacy” in Birmingham. The project delves into the blurred boundaries of connections on dating apps and the individual exploration of love. As a Southeast Asian growing up in a conservative big family, Jeremy was taught to conform to societal expectations of heteronormativity. However, his journey of self-discovery began when he turned to dating apps to explore his own identity. Jeremy has photographed men who he meets online, visiting their living spaces and capturing vulnerable moments. This process exposes the subtle but pervasive power dynamics that shape contemporary relationships, particularly within the Western world. It led the artist to question conventional notions of desire, confront issues of race, and navigate the complexities of contemporary dating culture.

About Eliza Bennett:
Eliza Bennett is a multi-disciplinary arts practitioner & facilitator, based in Stafford UK. Her work evolves artful methods for communicating a range of sensory impressions by engaging in playful, attentive research within the landscapes and places she is situated. Works often tap into a bodily recognition beyond language, inviting us to consider the affective, enchanted character of the worlds in which we are enmeshed. What arises are material propositions for ways of being, reading and viewing that are attuned to both emergence and loss.

Eliza will be making new work in the landscape of Cannock Chase, England’s smallest designated AONB, and a location that is close to the artists heart and home. Her project considers how the framing of natural environments as passive-backdrops for human activity, contribute to distorting our experience of those environments away from an attitude of curiosity and respect toward one of disregard.

As an exploration of posthuman propositions, by moving away from the dominant singular perspective of detached observer, toward expressions of co-creative becoming, Eliza will outsource thinking to her embodied senses and the wider environment of which she is a part, with the aid of a custom-made, multiple-pinhole camera-tent. Creating a photographic body of work that highlights our interconnection with the natural world, along with the unseen implications of our engagement with sensitive ecologies.

Supported by Arts Council England.

Image Credit: (c) Eliza Bennett
Image Credit (Top): (c) Jeremy Chih-Hao Chuang