The Guardian
Exhibitionist: the best art show to see this week
Gayle Chong-Kwan has created many mythical landscapes from disturbing arrangements of foods. She once created a Tower of Babel from sweating meat, and also photographed an oatmeal version of Brigadoon, the Scottish village legendarily supposed to appear from the mist. At ArtSway in the New Forest, Chong-Kwan has created, then photographed, a place she calls Terroir, an imaginary tourist resort whose inhabitants are in thrall to vegetables of monumental scale. This is just one stop in a long-term project to examine the Grand Tour, a cultural trip that was a rite of passage for privileged young men before the advent of mass tourism. Food enters the landscape as Chong-Kwang’s metaphor for mastery – a kind of satire on those consumers of art, food, language and culture who imagined that they had digested entire worlds.
