Working primarily with photography and installation, Chong Kwan creates fantastical landscapes and environments consisting primarily of waste materials.
Existing somewhere between imagination and reality, her immersive arrangements create beauty and give attention and use to otherwise discarded, unimportant objects.
She focuses on competing notions of landscape and highlights collective histories and the ambiguous relationship between reality, appropriation, the detoured implications of fictional contemporary mechanisms and latter day myths in relation to urban development, master planning and waste.
Her large-scale mise-en-scene environments and photographs created out of waste products, found materials and documentary sources, are often sited in the public realm. She has exhibited internationally.
In 2010 Peckham Platform (then Peckham Space) commissioned The eyes see more than the heart knows, a temporary large-scale photographic hoarding by Chong Kwan which clothed the hoardings surrounding Peckham Space during the building’s construction and referenced local memory and history. In 2012 Peckham Platform commissioned Chong Kwan to make new work resulting in the exhibition Double Vision, exploring themes of memory and myths in relation to food and the senses through a fantastical, three-dimensional mythical landscape.
Her work was also part of the 2016 Peckham Platform Retrospective exhibition, a timeline of all 20 artists commissions realised by Peckham Platform between 2010 – 2016.
