Kenneth Tam
2021Breakfast in Bed
Kenneth Tam
The various activity-based groups that men create for socializing provided the point of departure for Breakfast in Bed. The project began by recruiting seven non-actors to participate in a mock men’s social club, the activities of which were filmed in a constructed set. Part social experiment, part absurdist theater, Breakfast in Bed is organized around the constructions of masculinity and the male body through role-playing, team-building exercises, and improvised actions that was developed with the participants throughout the process under my loose direction. Through staged play, the video examines the constructed identities that the men come to rely on in a group setting while enabling and facilitating their agency to perform themselves in front of the camera.
Breakfast in Bed
The compression is not subservient to the explosion; it gives it increased force
Kenneth Tam
Documents a negotiation of desire between the artist, Kenneth Tam, with the man in the box. After posting a Craigslist ad in the Casual Encounters section seeking a participant for a video, Tam responded with a project of his own. After repeated discussions, both the artist and participant ultimately agreed upon a set of conditions that attempted to satisfy both of their respective needs. The participant's frustrated intentions quickly came into tension with the artist's own refusal to fully acquiesce to his demands, yet at the same time Tam's prerogatives as an artist required him to compromise his position and meet the participant halfway.
The compression is not subservient to the explosion; it gives it increased force
sump
Kenneth Tam
"sump (2015) documents a series of invented rituals between my father and I. Shot in the basement of his current home, sump explores the fraught space we both occupy, and uses our bodies as a way to examine the interpersonal tensions that exist in the Asian father/son relationship. Our wordless exchanges typify the way we have come to communicate through acts of silence." - Kenneth Tam
sump
