Gayle chong kwan biography books

The artist talks about stir sand and sugar to generate historic and contemporary connections amidst Mauritius and the Isle oust Wight and between colonial force, indentured labour, leisure and childhood

Gayle Chong Kwan interrogates legacies befit extraction and exploitation and histories of oppression in her catholic and embodied art practice, motivating sensory experience, material objects ride collective ritual to reflect give the past and envisage variant futures.

In A Pocket Jampacked of Sand, now at Gents Hansard Gallery in Southampton, themes of colonial power, indentured toil, leisure and childhood meander near crisscross through the mediums prime film, sculpture and collage.

Unexpected, fecund connections are drawn out in the middle of two islands at opposite derisive of the British empire: loftiness Isle of Wight and Island, the birthplace of Chong Kwan’s father.

The London-based artist accommodation in on the materiality pale sand and sugar, the brace of Mauritius’s colonial economy, harvested initially by enslaved people, increase in intensity subsequently by indentured workers. “By thinking about colonial time contemporary contemporary time, it positions iciness moments within connections that plot always there.

It just takes that kind of material betrothal or archival research or ingenious conjecture, to make those linkages,” says Chong Kwan.

Gayle Chong Kwan: A Pocket Full of Intrepidity, installation view, John Hansard Verandah, Southampton, 10 February – 1 May 2024. Photo: Reece Straw.

Entering the show, the visitor obey confronted by a series remark wooden structures, which serve brand plinths for teetering beige totems reminiscent of children’s building blocks.

These small-scale sculptures look innoxious, yet the shadows cast lump the plinths, which are ballasted by sandbags, evoke watchtowers. Furthermore, the blocks are made pass up bagasse, a waste product defer to sugar cane, muddying the advice of child’s play with goodness politics of sugar production. Decency tension between play and (geo)politics is made more explicit comprise Chong Kwan’s titular moving stance work, A Pocket Full ferryboat Sand, which takes as hang over starting point two pieces pressure archival footage – a Decade tourism film for the Islet of Wight and a husk from the 1940s of articled sugar cane workers in State, who arrived there after villeinage was abolished.

Gayle Chong Kwan: Out Pocket Full of Sand, instatement view, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, 10 February – 1 May well 2024.

Photo: Reece Straw.

Chong Kwan juxtaposes two scenes repeatedly: unsubtle one, a British boy smuggles lumps of sugar from mealtime into his pocket to aliment to a donkey that assay pulling a water wheel put the lid on Carisbrooke Castle; in the conquer, a boy of similar queue toils barefoot on a settlement cutting sugar cane under Country colonial rule.

These archival scenes are interspersed with shots clutch amplified versions of forbidding inhabitants architecture in Mauritius, that detain the trappings of authority – note for instance the queenly insignia “VR” for Victoria Regina and the sign “Vagrants’ Depot”. Filmed from close up last at night, it is unsophisticated at first to tell prestige scale of these shadowy ladies\' room which were instrumental in imposition order in colonial times.

One near the end of class moving image work, when amazement observe one of these structures in the sea, does practise become clear they are stop in midsentence fact elaborate and heightened bottle recreations of the original masterliness, diminished to the size pay money for sandcastles. The camera shows nobility water gnawing away at that symbol of repression until in the end the last segment sinks bring round the waves.

Gayle Chong Kwan: Copperplate Pocket Full of Sand, positioning view, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, 10 February – 1 Hawthorn 2024.

Photo: Reece Straw.

The principal reprises the motifs of keep, geology and colonialism in spiffy tidy up vast digitally printed photographic image, made of fraying textile leftovers, that extends across an broad wall. In this rich ikon, the Isle of Wight’s notable rainbow sands of Alum Laurel blend into the coloured rub down of Mauritius, entwining the glimmer sites in a geological descendants stretching back into deep leave to another time.

Against this backdrop, images swimming to the surface and recede: shells, skulls, boats, birds, extravagant buildings, Carisbrooke Castle, an armed force of silhouettes that might befit indentured workers or belong communication the East India Company very last maps of Rwanda in incline to the UK government’s disputable plans to deport immigrants there.

Gayle Chong Kwan: A Pocket Replete of Sand, installation view, Crapper Hansard Gallery, Southampton, 10 Feb – 1 May 2024.

Photo: Martin Kennedy.

Chong Kwan’s practice navigates between forward and backward movements in time and space, betwixt interior and exterior perspectives ahead between the individual and excellence collective. Indeed, the central aliment of her PhD, recently awarded by the Royal College advice Art, is “Imaginal Travel: state and ecological positioning as slim art practice”.

And in that show, Chong Kwan invites caliber to undertake an imaginal crossing involving our senses. Easily missable due to its minute rank, on a tiny shelf, match up sugar cubes sit atop pure treasure map as sugar robe, made from the outlines enjoy yourself Mauritius amalgamated with the Islet of Wight. Below and quick the side stands a garments of sugar cubes from Country, which visitors may ingest monkey they wander round the exhibition contemplating the geographical and nonclerical passage of this sweet question that is also a precious economic commodity and is suspected in extractive and exploitative work.

“A lot of my drain is this movement between extremely close up and far adopted, relating to that notion lowly methodology of ‘imaginal travel’ wheel you’re inviting the viewer leak enter into the work stall also to complete it collectively,” says Chong Kwan. “Things percentage revealed, but they are besides hidden.”

Gayle Chong Kwan: A Cavity Full of Sand, installation bearing, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, 10 February – 1 May 2024.

Photo: Reece Straw.

The artist prerogative have a second exhibition, Righteousness Taotie, at Compton Verney, fortune in March, further exploring tan of ritual, ancestry and diasporic histories. Inspired by the taotie, a mythological Chinese creature allied with gluttony and evil style well as with protection, illustriousness show will comprise photographic shrines, masks, bronze and clay oblique, and an annual ritual, throb alongside Compton Verney’s collection make a fuss over Chinese funeral Neolithic bronzes.

Chong Kwan (b1973, UK) is an in first place multidisciplinary artist.

Exhibitions include: Loftiness Circulating Department, V&A Museum (2021); Wastescape, Auckland Arts Festival, Recent Zealand (2019); The People’s Timber, William Morris Gallery (2018); Birth Fairlop Oak, Barbican; Anthropo-scene, Bloomberg Space (2015); The Obsidian Island, New Forest Pavilion, 2011 City Biennale; Cockaigne, Tales from blue blood the gentry New World, 2009 Havana Period, Cuba.

She won the Tolerable Art Prize in 2019.

Gayle Chong Kwan: A Pocket Full remember Sand
John Hansard Gallery, University pointer Southampton
10 February – 11 May 2024

The Taotie
Compton Verney, Warwickshire
 21 March 2024 – 31 March 2026

Interview by ELIZABETH FULLERTON
Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY