Biography

Dr Gayle Chong Kwan is an award-winning British artist of Chinese-Mauritian and Scottish heritage, who exhibits internationally and lives and works in East London. She is known for her surreal constructed landscapes, multi-layered installations, mixed reality experiences, and sensory ritual performances of sculptural forms, structures of control, and natural growths. Her practice explores social history, ecology, and speculative research, often working with food, foraged and waste materials, archives, collections, archaeology, and collaborative methods. 

She uses techniques of collage, construction, and the creation of mise-en-scene landscapes, sensory experiences, and sculptural pieces to be worn on the body, often made out of detritus, remains, and documentary sources. She often works with people and communities in non-gallery settings, often in the public realm, and engages in research with collections and archives and people's relationships with them as a focus for her work. She has made landscapes out of rotting food, transformed a concrete underpass into a cave using 20,000 milk bottles, hosted a sensory banquet for a hundred people in the British Library to taste their collection, created an immersive photographic work in the longest tunnel in London Underground, made quarantine islands from historical images of diseases, and created photographs that people can wear out of the V&A collection.

Chong Kwan’s art is shaped by her contrapuntal, global, and diasporic lived experience and historiography. Her PhD in Fine Art on Imaginal Travel: political and ecological positioning through fine art practice (2022) focuses on interiority and collaboration to ask how art interventions in galleries, museums, and the public realm can question and challenge acquisitions, modes of public participation, and the status of objects and ecologies in which they sit. Her art is rooted in her severe visual myopia, contrasts between details, edges, and forms, with the viewer positioned as one element in a cosmology of objects, moments, and experiences. 

Education

She has a BA Hons Politics and Modern History University of Manchester, a BA Hons Fine Art Central Saint Martins, an MSc in Communications University of Stirling, an MA in Information Experience Design Royal College of Art, and a PhD in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art on 'Imaginal Travel: political and ecological positioning through fine art practice'. She is Lecturer in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. She delivers talks, lectures, workshops, and speaks on radio and TV about her artwork, research, and art and culture.

Current Exhibitions

The Great Instauration, National Museum of Scotland. 4 April – 19 April 2026
Babel. 100 Photographs to Inherit the World. MUDEC. Milan. 7 March - 28 June 2026
The Lotus Eaters, Penelope, Fondation Valmont, Venice. 5 May 2026 - 31 January 2027
Oneiric Archaeologies, Avebury Papers, Southampton City Gallery. 13 June - 17 October 2026
The Taotie, Compton Verney. 20 March 2024 – 31 March 2027

Radio

Gayle Chong Kwan on BBC Radio 4 Free Thinking, East/West Religious Connections 
31 January 2024

Gayle Chong Kwan on BBC Radio 4 Free Thinking, The Pan Hag
7 January 2016

Academic Papers

Kachef, R. & Chong Kwan, G.  (2026) Waste is Not a Waste: The Material and Temporal Value of Waste in the Anthropogenic Era. Journal of Sustainability.