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Gayle Chong Kwan’s work creates a dialectic universe, highlighting fictional contemporary mechanisms and the flowering of latter day myths. Her mise-en-scene landscapes, installations, and environments are created out of disturbing arrangements of waste, food and found materials. Her work highlights the ambiguous relationship between reality and appropriation and detoured implications, just as the Grand Tour tried to digest Classicism, mass tourism tries to digest the world in a more superficial and global way – pre-packaged, sweetened and adulterated.  Chong Kwan’s work moves between raw and cooked and back again according to a metonymic mechanism.  It is as if the materials release their ancestral qualities and transfer them back to the view rendering it unsettled, always ready to exude and to be corrupted, to return wild. The sense of remains in her work is about survival, something that may not be standardised. Chong Kwan works with photography, video, sound, installation, and performance and weaves together documentary and fantastical approaches to explore ideas of collective and individual memory, history and expanded notions of and frustration between the senses.  Chong Kwan has shown extensively nationally and internationally.

Awards include: Vauxhall Collective Award for Photography 2009; Pepinieres Europeenes Pour Jeunes Artistes Award; Arts Council England International Fellow. Recent exhibitions include: ‘The Grand Tour’, Galerie Kernot, Paris; ‘The Eyes see more than the heart knows’, Peckham Space, London; ‘Senscape Scotland’, Vauxhall Collective, Idea Generation, London; ‘Memoryscape Moravia’,  Centro Cultural de Moravia, Medellin, Colombia; Guest/Visitor Book’, Speakeasy, Word/Play, ICA, London; 5×5Castelló09, Espai d’art contemporani de Castelló, Spain;  British Subjects: Identity and Self-Fashioning, 1966-2009, Neuberger Museum of Art, New York; Tales from the New World, 10th Havana Biennial, Cuba; ‘Utopia’, Museu Berardo, Centro Cultural do Belem, Lisbon; ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’, Platform for Art, London; ‘Conversations’, Tate Britain, London; ‘Different Worlds’, National Portrait Gallery, London; ‘Folliescape’, La Villette, Paris; European Forum Emerging Creation, Neumünster Abbey, Luxembourg; ‘Stellar Dentrite’, Tatton Park Biennial, Manchester. Residencies include: Ricefield/Scottish Arts Council Residency, Glasgow; Coast International Residency, A Foundation, Liverpool; Venice Printmaking, Italy; Macroproyecto de Moravia, Colombia; UNIDEE, Fondazione Pistoletto, Italy; Ville de Paris Residency, Cite Internationale des Arts de Paris, Paris.

Born Edinburgh 1973. Lives and works in London.  Holds a BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins College of Art, an MSc in Communications from Stirling University, and a BA in Politics and Modern History from Manchester University.

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“These works comprise part of a larger project – The Grand Tour – in which Chong Kwan has conducted ongoing research in response to several European sites. The grand tour was a traditional itinerary of travel undertaken by wealthy European from the seventeenth century until the advent of mass tourism. Those returning from Rome and Venice would return worldly wise and sophisticated, having learned of the art, culture and mannerisms of Europe. Chong Kwan’s new body of work continues an artistic tradition of satirizing the grand tour that can be seen in the work of William Hogarth, for example.  The grand tour is so pertinent to Chong Kwan’s work not just because of the history of taste, however, but also because of the tour’s relationship to digestion and mastery.  As young men toured around Europe consuming particular art, food, language and culture, they thus imagined that they had digested entire worlds and histories, thus equipping them to lead with authority….Gayle Chong Kwan’s Grand Tour is a lesson in the impossibility of total digestion and knowledge – directing us to the unnoticed remnants that are easily ignored, like a banana skin lying in the kerb.  For it would be a slip up to believe that whole worlds, cities and cultures are quite so easy to digest from a tourist perspective.”

Laura McLean-Ferris, ‘The Grand Tour’, Portfolio, Issue 49 2009
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“Food is sustenance, but for Gayle Chong Kwan it’s also her medium.  The 34-year-old, half-Scottish, half-Chinese-Mauritian artist sculpts arresting landscapes made entirely out of chow. Like a gastronomic version of the Epcot Center, Chong Kwan’s pieces take the viewer on a journey across civilizations. Exploring the relationship between food, culture and what it means to take from the earth.
Her most prominent series ‘Cockaigne’ is a take on the mythical paradise made famous by the Brothers Grimm, capturing romantic landscapes with rolling vistas of lettuce leaf forests and pristine mounds of neatly churned butter.  But they also reflect a world raked over by man. Rotting fruit and meat convey a sense of desolation, the dried out flesh suggesting an environment stripped to its dystopian core.  “We often literally consume the landscape”, she explains.  “And it’s important for me to show how people can work with the environment, instead of shaping it to correlate with our needs and wants.””

‘Gayle Chong Kwan’, Theme Magazine, New York, July 2007
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“Cockaigne, the 14th century mythical medieval land where leisure time reigns supreme and food is in abundant and infinite supply has been given a new and inspired lease of life by Gayle Chong Kwan…Cockaigne comprises twelve photographs showing the idle gourmand’s paradise in all its decadent glory, but with a delicious twist: the landscapes themselves are made entirely out of foodstuffs…. But, just as Damien Hirst is making moves to replace his now-rotten shark in formaldehyde in The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), Gayle Chong Kwan has worked skillfully to capture the temporal for posterity. Her micro-worlds were created two years ago and have obviously been consigned to the waste bin long before now; but her photographic timing is perfect. The culinary treatment of a centuries-old, utopian legend makes us aware of the intrinsic decay within so great an empire, leading all too readily to its demise. And so the food is pictured just on the verge of turning bad. In Resort (2004), the stately cheese buildings are sweating; in Babel (2004), the strips of ham, pinned together to form a magnificent tower, are curling and rancid. Even the apple palm trees of Avalon (2004) are brown underneath. And therein lies a sobering moral to give us all a little food for thought.”

Kay Carson, ‘Cockaigne’, 24 Hour Museum, UK, July 2006
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‘Alma Mater’
“On a softer note, Gayle Chong Kwan’s installation produces a profound and insightful experience that also touches on the canal alongside the gallery. A tiny dinner table set with small samples of food can be enjoyed whilst blindfolded, accompanied by a headphone soundtrack. Meanwhile, menus on the table recount the experiences of local shop owners being displaced by the drive to regenerate the neighbourhood around the gallery.”

Anthony Alexander, ‘Alma Mater’, a-n reviews, April 2006
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“Gayle Chong Kwan is an artist based in London whose practice has periodically readdressed individual and collective ideas of paradise and utopia. However these relationships tend to be played out in contested public spaces rather than insulated gallery micro-climates, and are not generalised but intensely local and complex in tone. Her prior education in political science and a Masters qualification in Communications is an interesting element in a practice that routinely deals openly with the contested territory of utopia on an intimist scale.”

Sarah Browne ‘It’s Going to Get Worse’, Visual Artist News Ireland, November 2005
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“These beautiful images are constructed from foodstuffs, which are verging on the repellent. The personal and global politics of food has been a major focus of Chong Kwan’s work to date and here one is reminded of butter-mountains, cheap factory farmed products and BSE. Given the references to tourism and paradise, these images also carry connotations of western excess at the expense of the global south. Chong Kwan’s complex photographs remind us that contemporary dreams of pleasure, ease and satiation are similarly ambivalent.”

Fiona Candlin, ‘Cockaigne’, Portfolio, Issue 41 2005