Vunkwan Tam

Vunkwan Tam’s practice ranges across sculpture, video, text, sound, and installation. He explores ideas relating to the internet age, which flattens culturally significant objects of all eras into a single consumable mass. For Tam, this contemporary behaviour encapsulates the absurdity of the compression and contortion of (as well as disengagement from) feelings of sorrow and frustration—feelings that reached full expression in the failure to fully manifest a communal sense of mourning in the wake of the protests in Hong Kong in 2019 over encroachment by the mainland Chinese government and the way the region’s authorities were dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Vunkwan Tam
Vunkwan Tam, Untitled (The traffic noise arched over a bubbling mass of public conversation and pattering footsteps on concrete), 2021 (readymade sculpture; installation view: F, 2022). Courtesy of the artist and Empty Gallery. Photo: Michael Yu

From the Archives

  • 2023 / core / exhibition

    Group Exhibition
    Tumbling In Harness

    Art Museum
    This exhibition brings together Oreet Ashery, Common Accounts, Stine Deja, Charlie Engman, Russell Perkins, and Vunkwan Tam, six artists who explore representations of death and grief within the digital sphere. Collectively, their work acts as an inquiry into the sociological implications of online death in the age of advanced capitalism—a complex, recently-emergent phenomenon whose consequences are yet to be fully understood.
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