Gayle Chong Kwan, ‘British Museum’, ‘The Taotie’ (series), 2024
Gayle Chong Kwan is a British artist of Scottish/Chinese-Mauritian heritage whose muti-disciplinary work – photographs, sculptures, installations, public realm projects, processional performances, and large-scale sensory ritual events – is exhibited nationally and internationally. Her art practice and research focus on an expanded and embodied notion of photographic practice to ask how interventions in museums, galleries, institutions, and the public realm can challenge their acquisitions, modes of public participation, the status of collections, and the ecologies in which they sit. Her work acts within and against histories of oppression and positions the viewer as one element in a cosmology of the political, social, and ecological.
Gayle explored Compton Verney’s internationally important miniature portrait and Chinese funeral bronze collections to connect photography, sculpture, and ritual in colonial, diasporic, and collecting histories and contemporary issues and locations. She was interested in changes in scale whereby the portrait of a person became smaller and more intimate, and the transformation of domestic cooking, eating, and drinking vessels into to more elaborate and larger versions for ritual and ancestral worship.
She carried out research, engagement activities, and studio experimentation to look at familial, institutional, ritual, and sensorial approaches. She cast impressions of decorative elements of the bronze funeral objects and spent time handling the miniature portraits – the intended way in which they would have been experienced. Gayle also held online workshops with participants to explore personal and sensory memories in domestic cooking vessels and cutlery. She worked with local historians to learn about histories of the location and previous inhabitants of the grounds on which Compton Verney is situated, including the Medieval burial plots. She collected earth from areas around Compton Verney. She carried out research on the Ghost Festivals in Medieval China and diasporic sensory rituals. She became interested in the practice of x-raying objects in collections for information on provenance, repairs, and making histories. She was excited by the motif of the taotie that featured on Shang Dynasty bronzes – mythical zoomorphic Chinese creatures that pivot between human and animal, earthly and heavenly, and as devouring monsters and/or spiritual protectors.
Through her residency at Compton Verney, Gayle developed new work of a series of nine wall-based ‘shrines’ of photographic prints combined with miniature bronze and clay sculptures. Each of these refer to the specific histories of the politics and provenance of museum collections, diasporic rituals of sustenance, and resonance in contemporary locations and sites. She features in each of the photographs, wearing a three-dimensional mask that she made entirely out of printed, cut, and collaged archival and historical images. Ranging in scale from miniature and intimate to giant masks that overwhelm her body, Gayle is photographed in contemporary locations that are implicated in the extractive histories present in each mask. The Taotie will be installed alongside Compton Verney’s internationally renowned collection of Chinese Bronzes and each year on the same date a ritual will be performed in relation to and in front of them.
Partner Reflection
Compton Verney
Hannah Taylor, Project Manager and Contemporary Arts Producer
Abigail Viner, Director of Creative Programmes & Engagement
March 2024
Before 2022, we did not have a regular artist-in-residence programme, and the 20/20 project has been an important catalyst for embedding this model into our strategy. The long-term relationship has not only been meaningful for Gayle Chong Kwan and our organisation, but it has positively impacted our community by bringing them along on the journey of the process and the outcomes of the work.
As a permanent acquisition, there is an authentic investment and sense of shared ownership of the work. This has enlivened our community of regular volunteers and front-of-house staff and opened up multiple engagement routes through our public programming, including workshops with groups on our community access scheme, collaborative talks and presentations with other local artists, and experimental performative rituals with our audiences. It is already showing us that this way of commissioning and acquiring opens up conversations around not only how we provide space for more diverse reflections and narratives and disrupt our traditional understanding of the museum archives, but also how we can start to consider art collections as spaces for shared histories through long-term engagement with the artist through the public programme and, in turn, how to filter these opportunities down to front-of-house and gallery staff, all of which ultimately improves access for visitors.
Compton Verney was already a signed-up member of More Than A Moment. However, the collections are owned by a separate trust and they are loaned out to Compton Verney which manages the collections on behalf of the board. The 20/20 residency came at a time when Compton Verney needed to renegotiate the loan of collections and was reviewing how we manage collections, collection curatorial strategy and collection management policy. Therefore the 20/20 project was a great way to open up challenging conversations about how the existing collections were acquired (by our founder Sir Peter Moores), and how we display, acquire and manage these collections. This enabled us to build on work happening in other areas of the programme and create dialogue with the board about the collections.
• The residency enabled us to have some transparent and difficult conversations with the board about lack of representation of women artists and ethnic diversity within the collection.
• Reaffirmed the need for a collections strategy and collections development policy in which we articulate the need for more diversity in the collection and to update interpretation to better reflect challenging narratives.
• The project built on work within the Sensing Naples redisplay and the commissioning of work of contemporary artists Aaron McPeak and DYSPLA in partnership with Unlimited.
• The dialogue helped us to make the case to the board to acquire suffragist-related items for our Folk Art Collection.
• Gayle Chong Kwan’s artwork is the first contemporary installation and acquisition through commission/residency into the Chinese Collection and our historic collection in general.
• The first contemporary work acquired by the board is a sculptural work in the grounds by artist Erika Verzutti, in tandem with the Chong Kwan acquisition.
• This work has paved the way for the next board meeting to consider the curatorial and acquisitions strategies and the proposal of a contemporary strand of the collection through the commissioning process.
