Kenneth Tam
It’s hard to tell if Tam is uncomfortable in his videos. Sometimes, he’s solicited to do things he doesn’t want to, and you wonder who is in control. ‘I foregrounded my insecurities in a way that I perhaps could never have done in a lived, casual kind of way,’ Tam told me recently. We first met on a muggy Houston summer day in 2016, halfway through his Core Residency at the Museum of Fine Arts. Tam’s studio was lined with the wood panelling that forms the backdrop of Breakfast in Bed (2016), an unexpectedly sweet culmination of his instructional videos. Men invited from Craigslist tag each other with paint and rustle around in aluminum foil suits while holding back laughter. There’s an oddly peaceful moment when the men inexplicably appear in panda masks, mime acts of swimming and end up on the floor, as if at kindergarten naptime. Do they feel the intimacy we project onto them?
Breakfast in Bed signalled a shift in Tam’s work, as he sought to examine larger structures of masculinity from behind the camera. His latest work, Silent Spikes (2021), currently on view at the Queens Museum in New York, takes the masculine trope of the cowboy and the 1867 strike of Chinese Transcontinental Railroad workers as its starting point. In the video, Tam is disarmingly direct, asking a group of Asian men what they think sensuality is – something I never thought would be a matter of public concern.
