Gayle Chong Kwan

Chong Kwan is a Research Candidate in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art,[1] London, (2012-). She holds a BA Hons Politics and Modern History, University of Manchester (1994), where she specialised in Post-Colonial Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa; an MSc in Communications, University of Stirling (1995); and a BA Hons Fine Art, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (2000).

Gayle Chong Kwan is a British artist who is known for her large-scale mise-en-scene environments and photographs, created out of waste products, found materials and documentary sources, and which are often sited in the public realm.[2] Her work highlights the ambiguous relationship between reality, appropriation, fictional contemporary mechanisms, and latter day myths and has focused on contemporary developments in tourism, trade and development in relation to their impact upon the landscape.[3] Chong Kwan develops her work through a process which can involve sensory activities, participation, and historical or archaeological inquiry, to create settings or props through which more fantastical modes of phenomenological experience or re-visioning can take place.[4]

• Arts Council England International Fellow (2005)
• Pépinières Européennes pour Jeunes Artistes Award (2005)
• Vauxhall Collective Photography Award (2008)
• Royal Scottish Academy Award (2013)
• Refocus: the Castlegate mima Photography Prize, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima) and Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council (2013). A commission to produce ""Arripare"[5][6]
• 'Wandering Waste', Stills, Edinburgh, and Deveron Arts, Huntly, Royal Scottish Academy Award (2014)
• FATHOM Award, Four Corners, London (2014)[7]
• British Council/Arts Council England International Artist Award - 'Photography in the Public Realm New York' (2015)

Chong Kwan was born in Edinburgh to a Scottish mother and a Chinese-Mauritian father. She lives with her two sons (born in 2009 and 2015), in Leytonstone, London.[8]