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.