The Lotus Eaters (2026)

Gayle Chong Kwan ‘The Lotus Eaters’ (2026) is an installation that moves between sculpture, fabric, processions, and a moving-image VR landscape. Hanging fabric doubles as wearable cloaks and poles bearing kitchen utensils and fabric forms are also used in performances of ritual processions. Chong Kwan’s work reflects the home as both a battleground and a source of strength. It reinterprets the theme of xenia (sacred hospitality) through Penelope’s perspective, her maids, and her encounters with the 108 suitors, through surreal versions of domestic, kitchen, and household objects and images. Gayle Chong Kwan takes the classic and traditional ideas of domesticity and the domestic space and transforms them under the guise of a dream-like world into defence, cunning, tactics, and battle. The work blends escape, memory, and resilience in material, virtual, and performative approaches. 

The work expanded from the gallery into the streets of Venice, with Chong Kwan wearing printed fabric from the installation as a cloak, leading a procession with each performer holding one of the military staffs made from domestic kitchen utensils and surreal fabric forms. The procession moved from the gallery to Ponte delle Tette, a bridge used by prostitutes who were encouraged to stand topless on the bridge and nearby windows. In the 15th century, a curfew was imposed on prostitutes and authorities, the Venetian state, keen to suppress homosexuality, allowed prostitutes to display their breasts from the balconies and windows near the bridge and at night there were permitted to use lanterns to illuminate their breasts. The performers repeated in whispers the ideal characteristics attributed to women in the sixteenth century - Chastity, Silence, Modesty, Reticence, Sobriety, and Obedience – while each performer walked to the centre of the bridge where they shouted, hissed and screamed non-verbal vocal sounds of resistance and revolt. The procession moved back through the streets into the gallery, where the artist gave out balls of clay to the audience who were invited to make offerings to the pre-Christian Goddess Reitia while the procession circled around offerings they had made in a workshop with the artist. Chong Kwan ended the performance by reading a passage from Tennyson’s poem ‘The Lotus-Eaters’ as the procession wound its way back up into the gallery. 

Penelope embodies the role of the mistress of the house where hospitality is inverted and forced upon her, a situation in which the domestic role and site are placed under constant siege. The constant pressure under which she lives has the effect of turning her into a woman who hangs grimly to the past and finds solace and comfort only in the world of sleep and dreams, though even those can be painful for her. Penelope was a subversive weaver, an artist ahead of her time. She transformed the only means of expression granted to women (the loom) into a weapon of resistance. Her endless canvas was not an exercise in patience during the long wait for her adventurous husband, but a project of sabotage against the established order; it is the strategic gaze of someone who, with intelligence and cunning, governs time rather than suffering it. Penelope is not just a mythical figure, the result of a specific vision of the world, history, and the role of women in society, the archetype of the ideal woman sculpted by the male gaze, which yesterday, as today, imposes its voice. Since the time of Homer's myth, Penelope has emerged as a figure fighting for her own self-determination. She is a woman who attempts to redesign and choose her own destiny, escaping what tradition would have already written for her: the petrified role of faithful, virtuous woman, devoted wife and mother, guardian of the hearth.