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Installation view of various works by Vunkwan Tam, 8th Yokohama Triennale, Wild Grass: Our Lives, March 15 – June 9, 2024. Curated by Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu. Photography: YAMAMOTO Masahito Photo courtesy of Organizing Committee for Yokohama Triennale

Vunkwan Tam at Basel Social Club, June 11 **– 16, 2024.** Photography: Michael Yu

F, Empty Gallery, 27 August –19 Nov 2022. Photography: Michael Yu

Vunkwan Tam, *may you have neither dew nor rain, may no showers fall on your terraced fields*, 2023. Installation view, 118½, Emalin, 2024

*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

*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 (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. Often taking the form of marginally adjusted readymades—whether found objects, images, or textual fragments—Tam’s work expresses what might be termed a contemporary ethics of exhaustion, foregrounding the residues of circulation, labor, and the minimal human trace in place of the conventional performance of artistic personae. He received his Bachelors in Fine Art from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2020, and opened his debut solo exhibition F at Empty Gallery in 2023. He has participated in group exhibitions and performances at Emalin, London (2024); Art Museum at the University of Toronto (2023); Para Site, Hong Kong (2022); and Tai Kwun Contemporary (2020). In 2024, he participated in the 8th Yokohama Triennale and Basel Social Club.

CURRENT:
Improvisation
Inside Out Museum, Beijing
September 20, 2024 – January 19, 2025
Curated by Carol Yinghua Lu

Vunkwan Tam_Bio CV
DOWNLOAD pdf (166 KB)

Vunkwan Tam press archive
DOWNLOAD pdf (1.3 MB)


2024-11-16	Taro Masushio, Pass, by Wong Binghao in Mousse Magazine
	“Just as he is uninterested in entrenching binaries of fact and fiction, resistance and capitulation, or authorship and appropriation, Taro Masushio is likewise wary of identitarian overdeterminations and the corollary imperative to verify and reveal any singular “truths” behind his photography. He sets himself the task of resisting the medium’s claims to the indisputable legibility of subjects in front of or behind its lens. His latest show at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong (all works 2024), juxtaposes two types of photography—UV prints on found cardboard and more traditional still lifes—to complicate the medium’s supposed technological purchase on truth and transparency. It highlights his proclivity for playful formal experimentation when faced with the camera’s potential for capture, which has often proven symptomatic of the colonial hunger for knowledge, order, and coherence. Through his shrewd sequencing of images, the artist seems to suggest that the medium of photography holds the capacity to conceal and equivocate, despite its presumed indexical fidelity to the “real.”” 更多…
2024-11-14	Para Site 2024 Benefit Auction
	Empty Gallery is pleased to support Para Site’s 2024 Benefit Auction. The works by Doris Guo & Weili Wang and James T. Hong are available to view on 9/F of H Queen’s in Hong Kong through 17 November, the silent auction will continue through November 20, 10.30pm HKT. 更多…
2024-11-06	H.G. Masters on James T. Hong at Empty Gallery
	In issue 141 of ArtAsiaPacific, deputy editor H.G. Masters covered James T. Hong’s Apologies, which was on view at Empty Gallery from June through August 2024. 更多…
2024-11-05	Intermissions: Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork & Laetitia Sonami at Renaissance Society, Chicago
	At the Renaissance Society, Gork develops a new project for the Intermissions series in collaboration with performer, sound artist, and electronic musician Laetitia Sonami. Directly engaging with this unique setting, Gork introduces new physical elements into the empty gallery space, positions multiple sound sources, and experiments with the room’s unusual acoustics. For two days, Sonami and Gork mobilize and shape the sound within this environment across various listening zones. Visitors are free to come and go during the durational performance. Curated by Karsten Lund with Michael Harrison Special thanks to Meyer Sound, Berkeley, CA. 更多…
2024-11-05	Vunkwan Tam collaborating with Winsome Wong and Annisa Cheung, HICCUP, Tai Kwun, Hong Kong
	On the weekend of November 8-9, Winsome Wong will present ‘Love Song: the bittersweet crumbs of having them at home’ in collaboration with Vunkwan Tam and Annisa Cheung, at Tai Kwun’s HICCUP, a festival of body and sound co-presented by Tai Kwun Contemporary, Contemporary Musiking Hong Kong (Sound Forms), and Per.Platform. For the full schedule, see the link below. 更多…
2024-11-01	Doris Guo, The Jar at K4, Oslo
	Doris Guo’s solo presentation, The Jar, is on view November 1st through 24th at K4 in Oslo, a non-profit gallery space for video art and moving image. The exhibition is open on Saturdays and Sundays, please see the link below for further details. “The starting point of this exhibition was based on my desire for having always wanted to make a horror movie. At many periods of my life, especially busy and stressful ones, I take comfort in throwing on any horror movie, cheesy and predictable with familiar sounds and jump scares. Amongst the many horror tropes one might experience, I particularly get a lot of enjoyment out of police and military being utterly useless. It’s an assumed, natural fact of the characters and by the general audience. I wanted to set my horror movie in a particular style of housing in the Pacific Northwest.” 更多…
2024-10-26	Cici Wu, Travel Star Between Ceasing and Arising, Scheusal Berlin
	Cici Wu’s solo exhibition Travel Star Between Ceasing and Arising is now on view at Scheusal Berlin from October 26th onwards.
2024-10-25	Jes Fan, Sites of Wounding: Interchapter, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
	Jes Fan’s debut New York solo exhibition is now on view at Andrew Kreps Gallery’s 55 Walker space through December 20, 2024. In his practice, Fan employs the often invisible substances that shape our experiences with the world to explore the often malleable ways in which biology, ecology and identity intersect. Working in close collaboration with biologists, farmers, and medical universities, Fan’s transdisciplinary projects examine how sculpture can be used as a tool to unravel material from its accumulated history. The exhibition continues Fan’s episodic project Sites of Wounding, first initiated in 2020. A pool of boiling soy milk is positioned at the gallery’s entrance, and utilized as a projection surface for a visceral video documenting a homemade endoscopy. Upon looking at the congealed skin-like surface of the white liquid, the viewer is not offered a reflection, but instead offered an interior view of the artist’s body. This underscores a larger interest in Fan’s work, of collapsing the membrane that demarcates the external body from an internal space. New sculptures belonging to the project’s second chapter are informed by Fan’s research into Agarwood trees, as well as an interest in how injuries are capable of generating new meaning. Native to Hong Kong, the trees produce a fragrant resin in response to stress, and trauma. In the healing process, the tree’s fibers harden, building density and structure around the wound. To create sculptures in this chapter, Fan 3D prints CT scans of his own musculature and combines traditional techniques such as glass-blowing. Mimicking the formal qualities of the infected Agarwood tree, these abstracted forms point to the transformative potential of trauma carried by the human body. A punctured freestanding wall furthers this inquiry, inviting viewers to peer at the sculpture embedded within it. 更多…
2024-10-09	Jes Fan in Scientia Sexualis at ICA Los Angeles
	Scientia Sexualis is an ambitious group survey of contemporary artists whose works take up the fraught relationship between sex, gender, and science. Organized by Jennifer Doyle (Professor of English, University of California, Riverside) and Jeanne Vaccaro (Assistant Professor of Transgender Studies and Museum Studies, University of Kansas), the exhibition is realized as part of the ambitious collaboration across arts institutions throughout Southern California known as PST ART: Art & Science Collide led by the Getty. It runs from October 5, 2024 through March 2, 2025. Featured artists include: Panteha Abareshi, Dotty Attie, Louise Bourgeois, Nao Bustamante, Andrea Carlson, Demian DinéYazhi’, Nicole Eisenman, El Palomar, dean erdmann, Jes Fan, Nicki Green, Oliver Husain & Kerstin Schroedinger, Xandra Ibarra, KING COBRA (documented as Doreen Lynette Garner), Joseph Liatela, Candice Lin, Carlos Motta, Wangechi Mutu, Young Joon Kwak & Gala Porras-Kim, Cauleen Smith, P. Staff, Joey Terrill, Chris E. Vargas, Millie Wilson, and Geo Wyex. 更多…
2024-09-27	James T. Hong at Argo Factory, Tehran
	I Am Standing in the Middle of the Information Highway and Laughing is a new exhibition curated by Raha Raissnia and Martin Germann, opening August 16 through October 18 at the Argo Factory in Tehran. Taking its title from late artist Jonas Mekas’ Manifesto Anti-100 years of Cinema, a performative exhibition in Tehran will unfold over two different episodes. Its main aim is to celebrate the unbound energy of collaborative work and friendship on the one hand and moments of reflection and stillness on the other. Its point of departure is the Manichean binary between darkness and light, as sine qua non condition for the existence of technologically mediated images. The second chapter of the exhibition, curated by Martin Germann, opens on Friday, September 27, with Marco Fusinato, James T. Hong, Tiffany Sia and Sam Lewitt. 更多…