Gayle Chong Kwan

Gayle Chong Kwan is a London-based artist who works in installation, video and photography, creating fantastical and disturbing images and environments.  Gayle Chong Kwan (b.1973) is of Scottish and Chinese-Mauritian descent and much of her work concerns the politics of travel – both personal and collective. She often uses found objects, archival materials and waste products to create environments which lie between fiction and reality.

The works in our collection – Republic, New Atlantis, Voyage to the World at the Centre of the Earth, Babel and Adonia – are part of the ‘Cockaigne’ (2004) series which borrows its title from a 14th-century poem by the German writer Hans Sachs about a kingdom abounding with sensual pleasures. The photographs depict fictional, mythological and religious landscapes, all made out of rotting food. They hang, appropriately given the subject matter, in our Fellows’ Dining Room and were curated with the help of Murray Edwards’s Head Chef.