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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.

Vunkwan Tam_Bio CV
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Vunkwan Tam press archive
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2025-05-06	Richard Hawkins and Emma McIntyre in Interview
	Getting Up Close and Personal with Painters Emma McIntyre and Richard Hawkins, published May 6, 2025: Born in New Zealand and now based in Los Angeles, the artist Emma McIntyre is no stranger to frequent travel. But the vibrant art scene of Hong Kong, the site of her second exhibition with David Zwirner, is a bit farther afield than even McIntyre ever imagined herself. Titled Among my swan, a name she’s borrowed from Mazzy Star, the show demonstrates the artist’s taste for chromatic abstractions that transcend the limits of language. “By introducing the swan motif,” McIntyre told Richard Hawkins last month, “I can connect to all the painted swans in art history.” She does so using oil paint alongside unconventional materials like oxidized iron, a gambit, Hawkins says, that suggests McIntyre’s granular attention to her artistic forbearers. “I think the difference is your investment in the history of painting,” he says, “but also how closely you look at other paintings.” Fresh off his own show at Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery, The Garden of Loved Ones, he and McIntyre got on a Zoom to discuss their shared obsessions: Baudelaire, art historian Michael Levey, and painting with your body, literally. 更多…
2025-04-22	Doris Guo: Oslo Open Studios
	As part of Oslo Open ’25, Doris Guo and other artists will be opening their studios from April 26-27 this weekend. 更多…
2025-04-20	7pm in Hong Kong by Geoffrey Mak, Spike Art Magazine
	As the roof caved in on the empire of the US dollar, a son of the diaspora returned to an art market buzzing despite censorship and mass exodus. Enter the Chinese century? 1. Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, lives in an area of my mind with high green hills and banquet halls and concrete residential towers whose balconies jut like vertebrae along spines made of stone. Wild boar roam the hills in the dark. Political prisoners in the Stanley jail bake in humidity and sweat without any air-conditioning. Jet-lagged from New York, I was taking a nap one afternoon in our hotel on the southern coast of Hong Kong Island, and was dreaming that someone I loved was handing me a piece of paper. I began pulling at it with both hands – it was blank, no message – until I felt someone kissing my face. 更多…
2025-04-11	Jaime Chu interviews Stephen Cheng in Spike Art Magazine
	Stephen Cheng on Ten Years of Empty Gallery, Jaime Chu, Spike Art Magazine The founder of Hong Kong art’s black cube on sheltering artists from the system, programming as film-making, and the experimental drug called jet lag. When I first moved back to Hong Kong as an adult in 2023, a new friend tried to recommend me cool things to do: “During a performance at the closing party for Vunkwan Tam’s show at Empty last year, [owner of noise label Mouhoi] Cedric Ng punched a sink until his hands bled.” They knew what to say, but they didn’t have to try so hard. In Hong Kong, historically an entrepot dominated by blue-chip galleries, unwieldy semi-private institutions, and a constellation of independent art spaces surviving precariously under colossal real estate conditions, Stephen Cheng’s Empty Gallery occupies an eclectic yet somehow exacting niche. It’s where minimalist experimental music, Japanese conceptual art and its heirs, and sculptural and filmic practices at the forefront of the Asian diaspora converge in a renovated industrial space notorious for its dark, cavernous interior. Friends who don’t otherwise care for contemporary art bring themselves to the hour-long queue for the gallery’s annual rave, and its artists have found genuine interlocutors within an industry that does not always afford them time. 更多…
2025-04-01	Richard Hawkins' The Garden of Loved Ones opens at Empty Gallery
	Our current solo exhibition of Richard Hawkins, The Garden of Loved Ones, opened on March 23, 2025, and was written up in the following publications: The best shows to see in Hong Kong ahead of Art Basel, Payal Uttam, Art Basel Nine Solo Shows to See in Hong Kong, Spring 2025, Anna Dickie, Ocula 7 Shows to See During Hong Kong Art Week 2025, Claire Shiying Li, Frieze Headed to Art Basel Hong Kong? You Need to Make Time for the City’s 13 Can’t-Miss Exhibitions, Giuliana Brida and Katie Kern, Cultured Shows to See in Hong Kong, March 2025, ArtAsiaPacific The exhibition, along with TRST03 Covey Gong, will be on view through May 24, 2025.
2025-03-19	Ophelia Lai interviews Stephen Cheng in Financial Times
	Ophela Lai, on the occasion of Empty Gallery’s 10th anniversary, interviewed Stephen Cheng, our gallery founder, in the Financial Times: “A pitch-black art gallery — now that’s a bright idea: Empty Gallery, a ‘black-cube’ arts space situated in a Hong Kong high-rise, has a reputation for immersive, experimental experiences: Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery envelops you in darkness. The lift doors open and, for the few seconds before your eyes adjust, there is nothing but a void — no walls, no doors, no floor. Stephen Cheng opened the gallery in 2015 in an industrial high-rise block in Aberdeen harbour. It is a “black cube”: an inversion of the white-walled space that has been the default for showing art since the 20th century. Born in New York, Cheng — the grandson of Hong Kong shipping magnate Yue Kong-Pao — was educated at Eton, and later Harvard where he studied photography and film history (and took classes with Nan Goldin). Darkrooms and cinemas became his favourite haunts. It was in dark spaces where art entered his life “in an irrevocable way”. 更多…
2025-03-07	Tishan Hsu at the San Jose Museum of Modern Art
	March 7, 2025 – ongoing Tending and Dreaming: Stories from the Collection launches the first dedicated collection galleries at the Museum. Providing unprecedented access to core works in San José’s only publicly held art collection, the Museum invites a deeper sense of community pride in the collection. The exhibition includes Tishan Hsu’s phone-breath-bed 3, 2023, which the museum acquired in 2024 for their permanent collection. Initiated in 1973 under the guidance of San José artists, SJMA’s collection has grown to reflect our international point of convergence, where dynamic cultural diversity and high-tech industries mix in California soil. SJMA’s collection galleries position artists as storytellers to imagine the Museum as a space where culture and meaning are actively made and always in process. Organized into thematic groupings, Tending and Dreaming offers poetic starting points for engaging with ideas woven through the works of almost fifty artists from the Bay Area and beyond, including Ruth Asawa, Martha Atienza, Shilpa Gupta, Yolanda López, and Elias Sime, among many others. 更多…
2025-03-05	Raha Raissnia in There Is No Center, ROH Projects, Jakarta
	There Is No Center at ROH Projects arrives not as a conventional presentation of artworks, but as an event in the truest sense—a disturbance in the usual flow of time. Extending beyond the gallery’s familiar five-week format, the twelve-week-long exhibition challenges the static nature of traditional exhibition-making, embracing a fluid proposition in which artworks enter and exit the exhibition at irregular intervals and for undisclosed periods, and performative actions instigate reconfigurations of how and where works are positioned. These movements establish ever-changing contexts and reconsideration of the works vis a vis in relation to each other, as well as in relation to themselves. Raha Raissnia will be installing new paintings in the second week of March, and hosting a film-performance on March 9. Read more details at the link below. 更多…
2025-03-01	Reina Sugihara, Empty Gallery by Aaina Bhargava in Artforum
	Reina Sugihara fantasizes about breathing like a bird—having constant access to fresh air, as she told me, and being able to inhale and exhale deeply as if it were second nature. Inherited from their dinosaur ancestors, the nine to eleven air sacs attached to birds’ lungs allow for oxygen storage enabling effortless and effective breathing. In today’s stress-filled world where we need meditation and breathing classes for their constant reminders to respire deeply and correctly, these small, round, inconspicuous air sacs seem like something that might be as beneficial for humans as they are necessary for birds. 更多…
2025-02-19	Reina Sugihara, Respirare, by Michele Chan in ArtAsiaPacific
	Emerging from the shadows of Empty Gallery’s customarily dark sanctum, Reina Sugihara’s paintings—softly illuminated by spotlights—exuded a quiet primordial force. Her abstract biomorphic forms, rendered in tones ranging from earthy to carnal, resemble blistering encrustations. The thickly painted canvases, some large enough to loom over the viewer, support viscous deposits of pigment and gesso that fissure as they dry. One thinks of scorched terrain, cooling lava, or half-healed wounds and scabs, but the associations are brief—the paintings resist legibility. 更多…

Getting Up Close and Personal with Painters Emma McIntyre and Richard Hawkins, published May 6, 2025: