“Made up of food, leftovers and waste, the universe in images by Gayle Chong Kwan is a dialectic universe…. The mythological constructions of Chong Kwan are sensorial in nature because they are saturated in mythical thought. Thought, as Claude Lèvy-Strauss wrote, that is drawn from sensory qualities: in it the raw and the cooked are associated with the question of the binary opposition nature/culture to lead to the understanding that cooked corresponds with socialised. We could therefore say that Chong Kwan does not structure her photos, she cooks them. It is not only to underline a process of fictionalisation, but even more to highlight a cultural process and all of its implications. It demonstrates the action of culture on a basic need: food is definitely sustenance, but it is also a collector of belonging and a building block for social community. And yet, on the other side, it may also be curiosity for the exotic which is always an attempted appropriation and – in the worst cases – a touristic almost neo-colonial devouring….Even in her most recent work Senscape Scotland, the relationship with the senses remains a central theme. Food is still present, but it becomes only one of the ingredients. The Scottish scenes are in fact constructed with other objects including photographs and materials found while travelling to Scotland. The models that inspired it are the scenes that Daguerre prepared to recreate the Scottish beauties used for of light, which may be considered as a sort of virtual experience precursor. If we add that Daguerre, the official inventor of photography, prepared these dioramas without ever having visited Scotland, it becomes clear why it appealed to the contemporary sensitivity of Gayle Chong Kwan. It is again the ambiguous relationship between reality and photography, the first media copiers of reality, which however create doubles, mirrored images – they are already virtual images.”
Read full critical text written by Sergio Giusti on my solo exhibition ‘Sensorial Universe’, Galleria Uno + Uno, Milan
Chong Kwan ‘Sensorial Universe’
