Babel
The Women’s Art Collection houses five of Chong Kwan’s large-format photographs from her ‘Cockaigne’ series from 2004. At first glance, these photographs look like luscious, mythical landscapes. Upon closer inspection, the viewer realises that everything is made of decomposing food: lettuce, bread, meat, cheese and fish. Far from their initial beautified appearance, Chong Kwan’s photographs verge on the repellent, where the dried meat in Babel is beginning to sweat, and the bread in New Atlantis has gone stale. These landscapes draw inspiration from the medieval myth of Cockaigne, an imaginary place of extreme luxury, and borrows its title from the 14th-century poem by the German writer Hans Sachs about a kingdom abounding with sensual pleasures. The series also takes Francis Bacon’s utopian island of Bensalem described in New Atlantis (1626) and the biblical tower of Babel. Developed out of research Chong Kwan undertook in Mauritius on how tourism is altering and consuming the landscape of the island, these photographs explore aspects of the ‘touristic gaze,’ created as a theatrical set, constructed through a single view-point of the camera lens. The photographs have hung, appropriately given the subject matter, in the Fellows’ Dining Room and were curated with the help of 91¶¶Òõ’s Head Chef.
