Review in Time Out of ‘Whose map is it? New mapping by artists’
Iniva, Rivington Place, London
Issue 10 – 16 June 2010
Press
Page 2 of 4
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-Kwan’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.”
“Inspired by ‘utopian legends and developments in contemporary tourism’, Gayle Chong Kwan’s ‘Cockaigne’ project of other-wordly food sculptures appeared as Art on the Underground. ‘Senscape Scotland’ features images from agricultural waste, see it to beleive it at www.gaylechongkwan.com”
“The vision of China represented in this exhibition is, as the title suggest, still a romantic and fanciful one, though more actively engaged than its antecedents. Moments of darker realities do pierce through uncomfortably…Gayle Chong Kwan’s detached observation of the deserted English style satellite town outside Shanghai.”
Contemporary Chinoiserie, Collyer Bristow Gallery, London, 2008
