Darren Bader

The Vagrant

XPLEX (proposal for exes)

proposals for Sculpture #4, Sculpture #3.95, Sculpture #3.985, (Sculpture #5) and Sculpture #7

Ellen Pau

Yau Ma Tei Massage Body Movies (油麻地拍身推拿)

Enzo Camacho & Amy Lien

Decomposition Animation

Sin Wai Kin

The Universe

Rei Hayama

Hollow-Hare-Wallaby

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy

17SC-06Trees-78Mountains-78Mountains-08Special-08Special-39Sky-17Trees

Jill Magid

Hand-hacked Bouquet 2

Florence Yuk-ki Lee

merry-go-round like a lullaby

Paul Pfeiffer

Vs. (Battle of Brisbane)

Cici Wu

Belonging and Difference

Langit Lupa

Kawita Vatanajyankur

Pendulum

Leung Chi Wo

My Random Diary 0

Hand-hacked Bouquet 10

Kang Seung Lee

The Heart of A Hand

you build a home in my mind

P. Staff

La Nuit Américaine

Shala Miller

Genesis

Vs. (Fight of the Century)

Helen Marten

Writing A Play (dark blue orchard)

Jes Fan

Palimpsest

Aki Sasamoto

Point Reflection (Video)

Jonathan Lyndon Chase

Mouth 1

Angela Su

The Magnificent Levitation Act of Lauren O

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

For Bruce (致布魯斯)

Sonia Boyce

FEELING HER WAY

Lydia Ourahmane

Tassili

Tiffany Sia

What Rules The Invisible

Samson Young

The messengers

Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi

The Same Track

James Richards

Qualities of Life: Living in the Radiant Cold

Walid Raad

Festival of Gratitude, Mao Zedong

Alex Da Corte

ROY G BIV

Nikita Gale

HOME

Shirin Neshat

Ungrateful/Blasphemy (Fragment 1)

A Dream of Wholeness in Parts

Tony Cokes

SM BNGRZ 1 + 2

Weather Bar Forecast #1

Juria Toramae

Pelagic Dreams

Shuang Li

ÆTHER (Poor Objects)

Yee I-Lann

Tikar Reben 

Zheng Bo

Le Sacre du printemps

Tao Hui

Being Wild (奔放)

It's Always You

Kenneth Tam

Silent Spikes

Martine Syms

Carolyn Lazard

Weather Bar Forecast #2

Scale of Injustice

Ugly Plymouths

Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff

Paradise

Ho Tzu Nyen

Waiting (Ripon Chowdhury with Ho Tzu Nyen)

Klara Liden

You're all places that leave me breathless

The Spade 

Alan Kwan

Bad Trip

Jonathan Horowitz

Best Picture

Quỳnh Lâm

I Am Not A Spy (video performance)

My Random Diary

Xiaofei Mo & POND

Lovers Revolt, Lovers Revolve 1

Evil.80.Empathy?

S1:E4

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

The Boat People

Charles Atlas

A Prune Twin

Lee Kit

Blink and blank

Imran Perretta

the destructors

The Prince of Homburg

Vvzela Kook

Drowned in, or not in the swimming pool

Unfinished Return Of Yu Man Hon

Thao Nguyen Phan

Becoming Alluvium

Lawrence Lek

AIDOL 爱道

Knit

Pulsating Atom (跳動的原子)

Martha Atienza

Tarong 11°16'12.0"N 123°45'23.4"E 2019-08-06 Tue 2:27 PM PST 1.50 meters High Tide Kaongkod 11°16'12.0"N 123°45'23.4"E 2019-08-03 Sat 12:14 PM PST 2.03 meters High Tide

Mute Grain (潘濤阮)

Andrew Thomas Huang

Kiss of the Rabbit God (兔兒神)

Su-Mei Tse

Shaping (塑形)

Wong Ping

Wong Ping's Fables 2 (黃炳寓言)

The Modern Way to Shower 摩登沐浴法

On Venus

Julian Simmons

EGG: Sarah Lucas & 750 eggs

Panangatan 11°09'53.3"N 123°42'40.5"E 2019-10-24 Thu 6:42 AM PST 1.29 meters High Tide 2019-10-12 Sat 10:26 AM PST 1.40 meters High Tide

Yuri Pattison

sunset (provisioning)

Capricorn

Robert Sandler

Fatal Loins

WangShui

From Its Mouth Came a River of High- End Residential Appliances

Garden

Do Nut Diagram

Jeremy Deller

Everybody in the Place, An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992

Luke Willis Thompson

_Human

Cecile & Marianna

How Long

Shuttle

Tell me everything you saw, and what you think it means

DESCENT

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Walled Unwalled

On the Collinear and Reflected on the Water

Gary-Ross Pastrana

Rewilding

2014
Department of Architecture Graduate Fellowship, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Asian Cultural Council Jackie Chan Foundation Fellowship
Grant for Emerging Artists, Hong Kong Arts Development Council

2013
Award for Young Artist (Media Arts Category), Hong Kong Arts Development Awards 2013
Gold Award (Interactive Media Category), The 18th Incubator for Film & Visual Media in Asia (ifva)

b. 1990, Hong Kong, China; lives and works in Hong Kong, China.

Alan Kwan is an artist, game designer and technologist. His projects include experimental video games, VR experiences and interactive installations, which he uses to explore new possibilities of real-time 3D technologies that depart from the traditional video game paradigm and typical tech fantasies of VR/AR. Instead of putting you into fights, competitions and puzzle-solving, his projects seek to craft emotional journeys that let you wander through otherworldly places, without the pressure of completing missions or fighting monsters.

, The 5th Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennale, Shenzhen (2018)

International Symposium on Electronic Art

2016, Hong Kong (2016), Digital Synaesthesia, University of Applied Arts Vienna, Vienna (2016);

Lifelogging, Science Gallery Dublin, Dublin (2015), Animamix Biennale 2013-2014 Rediscovery, The Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai, Shanghai (2014), Ars Electronica Festival 2013, Linz (2013)

For further information about this artist please click 

In 2011, with a custom video camera mounted on his glasses, Alan Kwan documented every waking moment of his life during that year and in doing so generated a database of digital memories. Using these digital memories and his dreams from the same year, he created the interactive, immersive game environment you see depicted here. Called 

 it allows audiences to delve into the artist's subconscious. Colourful memory blocks archiving his daily experiences are stored within different imaginary dwellings inside this expansive surrealistic virtual landscape. Audiences interacting with the game environment are free to roam at their will, but what is seen here in this video from 2020, is video documentation of a potential navigational path through the game as a linear narrative.

 (still), 2020, video, 10 mins 46 secs. Image courtesy of the artist and Pearl Lam Galleries.

, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist and Pearl Lam Galleries.

In 2011, I went to a group exhibition somewhere in Los Angeles, at a space whose name I can’t recall and which no longer exists. The only work I remember seeing that night was Kenneth Tam’s video 

The compression is not subservient to the explosion; it gives it increased force

, and I’ve never forgotten it. In my memory, it played in its own room, upstairs in a house, and I sat on a bench and watched the whole thing several times. In the video, Kenneth Tam, an Asian American man wearing a red flannel shirt, jeans, and sneakers, walks around a large cardboard box on the carpeted floor of a room. There is a man in the box who speaks in a flinty voice. They met on Craigslist. The Man in the Box negotiates with Tam: 

Take your clothes off, come closer, let me touch your butt, I want to grasp your genitalia

. We see only his arms, which he puts through holes he cuts in the box. Tam circles, hesitates, gets close to the outstretched hand, then backs up. He becomes naked below the waist, then puts his underwear back on. The Man in the Box makes a forced laugh whenever Tam says no to a request, which Tam does often. You can feel the Man in the Box’s pervy frustration through the cardboard.

You worry a little bit for Tam as the Man in the Box pokes his finger in between Tam’s butt-cheeks, reaches out to hold his junk. It’s at once threatening and cringe, menacing and pathetic. The intimacy, the reach for intimacy, only unshadows the bare alienation and unwieldy distance between the two men. You tell yourself that Tam is in control – it’s his camera, his situation, his art – and you wonder at the kink of it, at who is getting off more. How do these kinks feed on each other? About the work, Tam writes on his website: ‘After repeated discussions [on Craigslist], we ultimately agreed upon a set of conditions that attempted to satisfy both of our respective needs. His frustrated intentions quickly came into tension with my own refusal to fully acquiesce to his demands, yet at the same time my prerogatives as an artist required me to compromise my position and meet him halfway.’

The acutely uncomfortable vibe that pervades this video, as it does all of Tam’s work, has to do with this sticky point of collapse between refusal and acquiescence, of desires as demands, of satisfaction measured through tension, of the mild but oppressive suffering that lives in between awkward pauses, what lurks in what is not said.

In a word, it’s the ick that is the negotiation of masculine sociality. No other artist does this ick better. As his work has progressed since that early video of 2011 – moving from staged, performative videos like tone-poems suffused with sumptuous awkwardness, to more cinematic pieces that use edits and exquisitely coloured mise-en-scène to propel a muscular logic of storytelling – Tam has become his generation’s most fearless documentarian of the fact that masculinity structures our very world through this ick. It is the ick of how the softest, most hesitant parts of individuality are squashed and shaped through forceful, even brutal, concessions of socialization; and that this is not a side effect but the most necessary function of how masculine sociality is constituted at all. The ick comes from how one’s willingness to participate in this concession is the badge of honour with which masculinity rewards all of us forced to live under its regime. It’s the system that funnels everyone into hierarchical types, and then commends those whom it deems to fall into the type at the top (the leader, the alpha). In Tam’s work, we watch this negotiation of hierarchy, of dominance and submission, of leader and follower – whose hesitation or vulnerability can be steamrolled by someone more certain, more ruthless – and this plays out in situations Tam has pointedly constructed to always put the body on the line. The vulnerability of his male performers is enacted through various stages of nudity, or close proximity, or prompts to be tender and open towards each other. It is so visceral, it thumps in your throat while you watch. You feel as if insecurity is how men know they have bodies at all: there’s the embarrassment of having to live inside the body, the uneasiness of where to put one’s hands, how to hang one’s arms, how to stand in such a way as to appear – but never actually to 

Tam has always asked the question: How do men become men? Each Tam video work focuses on rituals that produce specific masculinities: father–son bonding (s

, 2020, originally a performance), male social clubs of the kind that gather in suburban basements (

, 2016). Throughout these works, he lets the question move from how much of this loss of autonomy is one’s choice, to how much it is the result of an individual bending and breaking under external pressures. From there, the question becomes how and why these external pressures came to be. Does anyone enjoy them? Who needs them? What do they cost us? How, and why, is this price not the same for each of us? How is it determined by race, ethnicity, class, sexuality? The fact of this price means that there is always the threat of violence, and Tam’s work is atmosphered with it, producing the fog of the question: Why does masculinity invest in rituals of violence as a way to get to intimacy?

Tam’s work does not offer declarative answers to any of these questions. Instead, he creates situations, images, and symbols that show how masculinity builds itself atop a foundation of boundaries being breached, or in danger of being breached. I think of how the idea of the boundary itself – a wall, a barrier, a membrane – feels especially constitutive of the masculine, insofar as the boundary functions as a thing to be destroyed, the thing towards which a penetrative force is aimed and propelled. Forgive my cis-heterosexual gender essentialism but, when I watch Tam’s work, I cannot stop thinking of how, when individual identity is constantly repressed for the benefit of the group – so that the group 

 the group – it produces a world where any moment of gentleness, trust, and connection is predicated on the awkward. Such moments function as wayward instances of consensual penetration; tender, shy emotion allowed to spurt through. Tam is a master at revealing the expression of this awkwardness, how risky anything sensitive, anything careful, is in this world. When the men in his videos are asked to compliment each other, you feel as though you’re watching someone carve out his own heart with a blunt blade and then ask if anyone might want to hold it.

When I watch Tam’s work, I think, ‘Is this gay?’ And then I realize that this is the exact question masculinity asks itself all the time. The threat of queerness is everywhere in a Tam piece, like an id, an elephant in the room, a Higgs boson particle that holds everything together but is unseen and can’t be measured with normative instruments. All of his male performers – who are unrehearsed, unscripted, and who, Tam makes a point to note, participate in the work not only for the money but because of their own interests and curiosities – seem very straight and very cis, but not necessarily by choice or desire. This sits on their frames just as awkwardly as tenderness does. It recalls the strings attached to puppets: the puppet master’s hands loom above, enacting the choreography of the patriarchy, and it’s the gracelessness as such of the puppets’ movements that gives them grace. The straight-cisness of these men is simply another aspect of their masculinity that seems to have been forged in the furnace of patriarchy’s hegemonic machinations – they’ve been burned by it, branded. When one man in 

, the video work about the high school prom, admits to wishing his prom date had been the girl’s best friend, who was a boy, it comes as a shock. There you are! I said to the screen.

, a two-channel video work from 2022, is Tam’s most cinematically accomplished video and also the most overtly queer in its symbolism. It proposes the figure of the Asian cowboy, what he might look and be like, what he might mean. Possibly the most redolent archetype of straight-cis masculinity, the cowboy can never not be camp – there is his colossal chin carved as if from stone, the legs splayed around a heaving animal, that walk that is all pelvis! – and Tam’s Asian cowboys are outlandishly camp. The dudes in the video are dressed like the Marlboro Man, though the costume seems ill-fitting against their non-white skins. They ride a mechanical bull in front of a fuchsia sound-stage sunset, and it made me think of how utterly unnecessary but very, very fun bull-riding must be. Their wavering voices speak towards prompts Tam has given them to describe sensuality, and again, we watch moments of tenderness ejaculate onto the scene in smears of gawky unease. These are interspliced with a long tracking shot through a mining tunnel, and then there are cuts to an Asian male dancer, deftly moving his body in the street.

, and pushes it into new territory for Tam in its engagement with a historical event, is a voiceover of a fictional text Tam wrote trying to imagine the first-person perspective of a Chinese labourer during the Transcontinental Railroad strike of 1867.

This text is fiction because, as Tam has noted in talks about the work, there are no first-person accounts from the Chinese workers themselves. There are only accounts from the rail company or white laborers, and Tam wanted to feel into this invisible history, let it hover in the air of those fuchsia sunsets that glow behind some of our most primary myths. By setting up this juxtaposition of the mythic Asian cowboy next to the ‘manifest destiny’ of the American dream that is always powered by racialized slave labour, 

 brings us again to a close, squirming encounter with that primary mechanism of how any individual’s assimilation into a group is always an index of how much of themselves they must lose – but here it reveals the site of this encounter as a place of fiction, a storytelling device, a mythos of the fantastical speculation that is the spine of society’s most intractable beliefs.

What I mean is: Men aren’t platonically real, born that way, determinedly pure quintessences, no matter how much they insist they are. They are formed – we form them – as much as any identity. For all its taciturn silence, refusal to emote, and smothering of expression, masculinity is one of the loudest storytellers that’s ever been, and its favourite subject is itself. In fact, what masculinity as storyteller does best is to make every character, every subject, every scene, every trope become a reflection, either affirmative or negative, of its own function, secondary to the telling of its own tale. This is why identity is always defined by its relationship and proximity to the myth masculinity tells about itself: You’re either one of us, or you are Other.

What Tam’s work has made me understand, though, is that masculinity gets off the most on declaring that no one has guaranteed entry into its club. It is the kink of masculinity that a huge entry fee must be exacted from 

 trying to get in, and masculinity as such is the enforcement of this entry fee at every door – even, or especially, at sites that were never doors to begin with. Masculinity is the telling of its own story in such a way that every site of encounter, of possible connection, has been transformed into a threshold to be crossed, a boundary to be breached, an innocent to be conquered, a door with a lock and a price. The preferred method of payment is the currency of ick. How much of yourself are you willing to sell to get in? How much of your soft neck are you willing to let be crushed by the heavy boot of the group? Through Tam’s work, I understand that we are never only the soft neck being crushed, nor are we only the line of boots bearing down upon it – we are all of us the fact of masculinity making us become the meeting place of these two. What happens there, what is produced under that terrible pressure, what we tell ourselves it means: this is society as men have written it. Ick!

Notes

Biographies

Ick! How Men Become Men: On Kenneth Tam

screening

Medium	Digital video
Duration	10 minutes 46 seconds
Edition	of 5 + 1 AP

Akeroyd Collection

Works

Alan Kwan, Bad Trip, 2020