Vunkwan Tam

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*Untitled (IIIII, a Quiet Life)*, 2021
Straw hats, enamel paint

*Untitled (XXI)*, 2022
Sunflower stems, nails
Installation view, ‘Temporary,’ 2022, Negative Space

It was not good in my garden that year/ It was not good in my garden/ I am not brave/ I am a merchant/ My trade was bad for me/ But for my family and for my fearful son, Drake/ It sure looked like bravery/ But it was not good in my garden that year/ It was not good in my garden, 2020
Cardboard boxes, concrete, spray paint, emulsion paint, stainless steel zip-ties, bricks, acrylic picture frame, chains, metal parts

*Spoiled, My New Wine,* 2021
Single channel video
Installation view at mcg21xoxo, Hong Kong

*Humanity hit a peak in 1588*, 2022
White noise machine
Installation view, ‘Temporary,’ 2022, Negative Space

*L.O.*, 2021
PVC pipe, T-shirt, engine oil
Installation view, ‘Noble Rot,’ 2022, Para Site

*Untitled (The First 10 Years)*, 2021
Mannequin, hat, enamel paint
Installation view, ‘A Temporal Test for all Possible Clouds,’ 2021, Tempé Art Space

*Untitled (Today We Must Savour)*, 2021
Crow wing, 2nd century BCE Celtic socket axe

*Untitled (Mob)*, 2021
Diapers, metal wires
Installation view, ‘A Temporal Test for all Possible Clouds,’ 2021, Tempé Art Space

Vunkwan Tam’s artistic practice ranges across sculpture, video, text, sound, and installation. He has participated in exhibitions and performances in Hong Kong including ‘Noble Rot,’ Para Site (2022), ‘Temporary,’ Negative Space (2022), ‘Sound Forms,’ ‘Contemporary Musiking,’ Tai Kwun Contemporary (2020); ‘Play. Boredom.Worship.,’ Tomorrow Maybe (2019); ‘New Babylon,’ Prsntprsnt (2019); and ‘Sincerity Machine,’ Twenty Alpha (2019).

Education

2020

Chinese University of Hong Kong, BFA

Solo exhibition

2022

F, Empty Gallery, Hong Kong

Group exhibitions

2022

Temporary, Negative Space, Hong Kong

Noble Rot, Para Site, Hong Kong

2021

A Temporal Test for all Possible Clouds, Tempé Art Space, Hong Kong

活體洞, Virtue Village, Hong Kong

A Clockwork Lai Chi, Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre, Hong Kong

2019

New Babylon, Prsntprsnt, Hong Kong

Play. Boredom. Worship, Tomorrow Maybe, Hong Kong

Screenings and Performances

2021

sundae, mcg21xoxo, Japan

2020

HKCR IS 3 x Upmood x Video Cypher, Terrible Baby, Hong Kong

Sound Forms, Contemporary Musiking Hong Kong, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong

2019

Sincerity Machine, Twenty Alpha, Hong Kong

Grants

2020–21

soundpocket Artist Support Programme

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2023-03-21	Jes Fan shortlisted for Sigg Prize 2023
	M+ Museum’s Sigg Prize 2023 will showcase the works of six shortlisted artists for the award. Open to artists born or working in the Greater China region, the award recognises important artistic practices in the region and aims to highlight and promote diverse works on an international scale. This exhibition is the second edition of the prize, which will present a wide range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, video, and installation. Through the works, the artists demonstrate their unique visions and approaches to current urgent contemporary issues, fostering the cultural dialogues emerging from the region in response to a critical transitional period of the world. The six shortlisted artists are Jes Fan (b. 1990, lives and works in Hong Kong and New York); Miao Ying (b. 1985, lives and works in New York); Wang Tuo (b. 1984, lives and works in Beijing); Xie Nanxing (b. 1970, lives and works in Beijing and Chengdu); Trevor Yeung (b. 1988, lives and works in Hong Kong); and Yu Ji (b. 1985, lives and works in Berlin). The Sigg Prize 2023 winner will be announced in early 2024. Read more …
2023-03-20	Taro Masushio in The Drifters, Duddell's
	To kickstart Art Basel 2023, Duddell’s Hong Kong presents ‘The Drifters’ from 19 March through May 13. Spotlighting artworks owned by Hong Kong-based collectors, including Alan Lo, Evan Chow, Lawrence Chu, etc., the works present transient memories and fragmented dreamscapes to explore the fleeting moments that straddle between euphoria, freedom, and unnerving vulnerability. Curated by Eunice Tsang. Featured artists include: Christina Quarles, Christopher K. Ho, Gross Arnold, Inka Eissenhigh, Matt Connors, Samson Young, Tabaimo, Tala Madani, Tang Dixin, Taro Masushio, Ticko Liu, Tomo Campbell and Yin Yeung Lau.
2023-03-14	Taipei Biennial 2023 Theme and Artists Announced
	Taipei Biennial is pleased to announce the curatorial concept for the 13th edition of Taipei Biennial, running from November 18, 2023 to March 24, 2024 at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM). Curated by independent curator Freya Chou, writer and editor Brian Kuan Wood, and curator Reem Shadid, this year’s Taipei Biennial is titled “Small World”. In this iteration, a number of artists are selected to produce or premier new works including Pio Abad (London), Nadim Abbas (Hong Kong), Nesrine Khodr (Beirut), Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork (Los Angeles), Lai Chi Sheng (Taipei), Li Yi Fan (Taipei), Jen Liu (New York), Natascha Sadr Haghighian (Berlin/Tehran), dj sniff (Los Angeles/Tokyo), and Yang Chi Chuan (Taipei). Read more …
2023-03-11	Xper.Xr in Tailwhip, TheCube
	Xper.Xr is a sui generis Hong Kong artist, noise musician, event organizer, as well as an expert storyteller, and this exhibition features his creative archives and activities since the late 1980s. Curated by Empty Gallery, this exhibition previously toured Hong Kong and New York. It is scheduled to be on view at TheCube in Taipei from 11 March to 14 May 2023. TheCube specifically juxtaposes the timelines of Xper.Xr and Taiwan’s noise movement for reference in the context of this exhibition. Co-organised by TheCube Project Space and Empty Gallery. Sponsored by the National Cultural and Arts Foundation.
2023-03-04	Yutaka Matsuzawa and Cici Wu in Of Mythic Worlds, The Drawing Center
	Of Mythic Worlds brings together more than fifty rarely-seen works by a diverse group of artists to highlight the ways in which rituals, myths, traditions, ideologies, and beliefs can intersect across cultures, histories, and time periods. Curated by Olivia Shao, the exhibition will be on view at The Drawing Center New York from March 8 through May 14th, 2023. Read more …
2023-03-01	Jes Fan featured in ArtAsiaPacific Issue 132
	Jes Fan’s work is the subject of a new feature ‘Precious Wounds’ by Mimi Wong in ArtAsiaPacific issue 132, March/April 2023. “In late 2022, for the first time since the pandemic began, I was able to fly the 15 hours from the United States to Hong Kong with my mother to visit our family. We had been planning the reunion with my relatives for more than one year. Still, I could not have anticipated how emotional I would feel to be able to travel again to a place that had always felt like a cultural home. Just three months earlier, artist Jes Fan was making a similar journey from New York to reunite with his immediate family, whom he hadn’t seen in three years. He landed the day after the government ended Hong Kong’s quarantine measures. “I arrived with a full plane of babies,” he remembered, alluding to the many parents bringing their one- and two-year-olds back with them for the first time. “They were crying, but it was adorable.” Read the full feature in print or with a digital subscription. Read more …
2023-02-18	Tishan Hsu in Day Jobs, Blanton Museum of Art
	Opening February 19 through July 23: One of the typical measures of success for artists is the ability to quit their day jobs and focus full time on making art. Yet these roles are not always an impediment to an artist’s career. This exhibition illuminates how day jobs can spur creative growth by providing artists with unexpected new materials and methods, working knowledge of a specific industry that becomes an area of artistic interest or critique, or a predictable structure that opens space for unpredictable ideas. The exhibition will feature work produced in the United States after World War II by artists who have been employed in a host of part- and full-time roles: dishwasher, furniture maker, graphic designer, hairstylist, ICU nurse, lawyer, and nanny–and in several cases, as employees of large companies such as Ford Motors, H-E-B Grocery, and IKEA. The exhibition will include approximately 75 works in a broad range of media by emerging and established artists such as Emma Amos, Genesis Belanger, Larry Bell, Mark Bradford, Lenka Clayton, Jeffrey Gibson, Jay Lynn Gomez, Tishan Hsu, VLM (Virginia Lee Montgomery), Ragen Moss, Howardena Pindell, Chuck Ramirez, Robert Ryman, and Fred Wilson, among many others. Organized by Veronica Roberts, Former Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, with Lynne Maphies, Former Curatorial Assistant, Blanton Museum of Art. Read more …
2023-02-18	Cici Wu's Tsaiyun (Rosy-Cloud) Bridge / Forget Each Other in the Rivers and Lakes
	Opening at the Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen, Norway on February 25, 2023: Cici Wu with invited artists: Chan Hau Chun & Chui Chi Yin, Taro Masushio, Xiaofei Mo, Park Xun, Fai Wan, Emilia Wang Can we multiply realities so that it equates to a fiction? An orientation of difference. A repetition’s anathema. Two indifferences in brackets. Liquid vision. – Taro Masushio Repairment has to be dispersed, but together. – Jaime Chu (Hong Kong-Mainland Relationship Repairment Study Group) In the center of the gallery space, a floating bridge made of paper and bamboo wires is illuminated from within by a projector, screening Cici Wu’s new black-and-white stop motion film. The exhibition’s titular work refers to Tsaiyun Bridge, which Wu first encountered in the art historian James Cahill’s personal clippings. Originating from an English edition of China Pictorial (1962), a state-sponsored periodical with roots in the very beginnings of propaganda efforts from Communist China. Struck by the translators choice to render Tsaiyun (彩雲) which translated literally would mean “colorful cloud”–– as “Rosy-Cloud”, perhaps this interpretative choice speaks simply of a translator with a romantic approach to language, but perhaps it also speaks of one who feared to not indicate the color red for political reasons. Sensing the traces of a peculiar affective and ideological world expanding behind this minute linguistic gesture, the artist began to meditate on the contours of a historical time marked by the violence of idealism and erasure of reality. Read more …
2023-02-16	Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork at ICA LA featured in ARTnews
	Francesca Aton for ARTnews: “Inspired by the music of Los Angeles’s techno warehouses, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork has created a visceral site-specific work that plays with the embodiment of sound. Situated in in the ICA LA’s project room (through May 14), the installation Into/Loving/Against/Lost in the Loop pulls audio from the neighboring exhibition about Milford Graves, the drummer and artist who died in 2021. This includes the sounds Graves made for the ICA show, as well as any visitor interventions. One can, for example, scream in the galleries and Kiyomi Gork’s audio equipment will pick it up in her installation in the adjacent room.” Read more …
2023-02-09	Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork opens solo exhibition at ICA Los Angeles
	February 11 – May 14, 2023: This presentation marks the first solo museum exhibition of Los Angeles–based artist Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork (b. 1982, Long Beach, CA), whose practice engages sound as both conceptual and literal material. Building on her ongoing explorations into sound as an architectural form, Kiyomi Gork has transformed the Project Room into a maze, revealing the integral—yet invisible—role that sound plays in shaping one’s perception. Titled Into/Loving/Against/Lost in the Loop (2023), the installation features an electronic beat generated from live audio pulled from the surrounding galleries. Inside, the rhythmic pulse of the beat is amplified and distorted through spatial and material interventions, such as speakers and sound blankets, reflecting the artist’s sculptural use of objects commonly associated with noise control. The circuitous structure of the maze underscores the feedback loop inherent to hearing, wherein, according to Kiyomi Gork, “What you hear affects how you move and how you move affects how you hear.” As its title suggests, Into/Loving/Against/Lost in the Loop describes the multifaceted nature of the feedback loop, speaking to simultaneous sensations of agency and loss of control, collectivity and isolation. Here, soundwaves vibrate through the body and orient the visitor as they navigate the maze’s twists and turns—at once transported away from, and brought back to, their own embodied experience. In calling attention to the somatic quality of sound, Kiyomi Gork blurs the distinctions between audience, performer, audio, and architecture to create a heightened awareness of the dynamics of perception. Read more …