Gayle Chong Kwan

Gayle Chong Kwan lives and works in London. She 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.

Her 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 metonymical 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.