by Gayle Chong Kwan
16 February – 18 March 2006
Babel by Gayle Chong Kwan.
Press Release 13.02.07
42 New Briggate is an initiative by Opera North Projects to unite contemporary visual art and opera. Cockaigne, the third exhibition at the gallery, accompanies Opera North’s new production of Orfeo which opens on Friday 16th February at Leeds Grand Theatre.
A voyage to the underworld makes for a visual feast in the latest exhibition at Opera North’s innovative new contemporary art gallery.
Cockaigne is a series of twelve large-format photographs based on 14th Century ideas of a glutton’s paradise. A land made entirely of food, where all wants and needs are met. Hams and cheeses grow on trees, fountains run with beer, houses are roofed with pies.
The exhibition links with Opera North’s production of Orfeo on the opera’s 400th anniversary year. Arguably the first opera dating from 1607, Orfeo is Monteverdi’s masterpiece based on the myth of Orpheus. The opera voyages with Orpheus on his journey to the underworld to reclaim his life-long love Euridice.
Gayle Chong Kwan is a British artist, born in Edinburgh in 1973. Chong Kwan has shown extensively in the United Kingdom and abroad. She has degrees in Fine Art, and Politics and Modern History and has an Msc in Communications. Recent projects include Platform for Art, London; Bonhams Contemporary, London; Great Eastern Hotel, London; and residencies at Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto, Italy and Venice Printmaking Workshop, Italy.
New Amazonia by Gayle Chong Kwan. An icy landscape made of butter and lard based on Casper David Friedrich’s ‘Wreck of the Hope’; the Tower of Babel created out of meats; an El Dorado of potatoes, and the Garden of Eden of rotting apples. A ‘Disney’ castle is revealed after close inspection to be constructed of sliced white bread.
Voyage to the World at the Centre of the Earth by Gayle Chong Kwan. A wooden mountain landscape made of fish and seafood, a smoked salmon mountain, a path of crab sticks, ‘Voyage to the World at the Centre of the Earth’ is based on an anonymous utopia written in 1755 in which the narrator falls into Mount Vesuvius and arrives in an idyllic region, where the inhabitants are strict observers of animal rights, and where fish are fed rather than being eaten.
Republic by Gayle Chong Kwan. Echoing Disney and fairytale castles, ‘Republic’ is named after Plato’s tract of the same name, the earliest surviving European Utopia. Written in 360BC, Plato’s tract proposes compulsion and authority, the iron discipline of the victors, with foreigners treated as slaves. To support this system of government a convenient fiction or is maintained, where the classes are deemed unequal. Slaves, who were not regarded as citizens and had no civil rights, made up a third of the population of Athens at the time of Plato.
Resort by Gayle Chong Kwan. A landscape of half built or half deconstructing holiday edifices, ‘Resort is made entirely out of cheese and dairy products. The medieval French word ‘fromage’ developed from the Latin ‘forma’ meaning the mould in which cheese was made. ‘Resort’ takes the form of the carcasses and shells of an epic hotel complex, half ruin and half incomplete, balanced between development and deconstruction.
Lotosland by Gayle Chong Kwan. Made of rice, and based on Tennyson’s poem ‘The Lotus-Eaters’, where Odysseus on the way home from the Trojan War disembarked into a fictional and dreamy land of flowery food. Those who tasted the honey-sweet fruit of the lotos were overcome with dreamy forgetfulness, lost all desire to return home and had to be dragged back to the ships weeping. Early travellers’ tales of the ‘Far East’ frequently fictionalised the Orient as exotic Elysian valley.
Brigadoon by Gayle Chong Kwan. Made of oats and based on the myth of Brigadoon, a Scottish village that exists only one day each century. A man stumbles across the village where he meets the love of his life, but no villager is able to leave and escapees who are caught are killed. He leaves for home in New York but cannot live without his love and returns to conjure up Brigadoon where he settles and accept true happiness for living only one day each century. The 1954 Hollywood version was filmed on an MGM soundstage as the producer Arthur Freed was unable to find a location in Scotland he deemed ‘Scottish’ enough.
New Atlantis by Gayle Chong Kwan. Made from frozen butter, margarine and lard, ‘New Atlantis’ draws on Casper David Friedrich’s ‘The Wreck of Good Hope’ and Francis Bacon’s 17th century utopia, where seasons, plants and animals were modified. Playing with notions of seasonality and temporality, the ability to freeze food on demand has also altered our relationship with produce. Butter was deemed too inconvenient and slow to spread led to chemically developed margarine. Whilst contemporary health worries mean that the use of lard has practically died out.
Bermudas by Gayle Chong Kwan. Made from dried fruits and inspired by descriptions of holiday resorts and Andrew Marvell’s 1681 erroneous description of how he imagined the ‘newly discovered’ Bermudas. Marvell’s Utopia was optimistically idyllic in the face of the harsh realities on the island, with slavery, violence and bitter religious disputes rife. “He hangs in shades the orange bright, Like golden lamps in a green night, And does in the pomegranates close, Jewels more rich than Ormus shows, He makes the figs our mouths to meet, And throws the melons at our feet, But apples plant of such a price, No tree could every bear them twice, With cedars, chosen by his hand.”
Eldorado by Gayle Chong Kwan. ‘Eldorado’ is based on South American landscapes where the potato was ‘discovered’ by the Spanish and the utopia described in Voltaire’s Candide. Written in 1758, the novel is a satire on the philosophical doctrine of Optimism, whereby everything, seen from a divine perspective, is for the best. Named by the Spanish, the fictional Eldorado is a topsy-turvy place, a vast open plain surrounded by inaccessible mountains, and protected from European and their greed of Eldorado’s precious stones, which its inhabitants place no material value on.
Adonia by Gayle Chong Kwan. A volcanic landscape made from vegetables, which draws on the Athenian festival of Adonia, symbolising the mourning of the death of Adonis, the beautiful male God who pleasured women. Every July women planted quick-germinating seeds of lettuce in pots, which were watered until shoots appeared when they were left to die. Used spices and alcohol, the festival explored women’s sexual desire on the normally unused space of the house, the roof and linked the annual renewal and seasonality of vegetables with the gods and unfulfilled sexuality.
Image courtesy of the artist.
Cockaigne is a commission by Autograph ABP