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Commissioned by ALL ARTS, Driver Brother is an experimental documentary that follows a group of immigrant cab drivers and poetically presents their financial struggle to acquire and maintain ownership of NYC taxi medallions.

Link to watch film at ALL ARTS















Credits

Drivers
Bilal Elcharfa
Naim Jaji
Ugyen Pema
Jaswinder Singh
Rehan Shah

Director and Editor
Kenneth Tam

Producer
Seika Paradeis

Director of Photography
Christian Carroll

Lighting
Shu Hirayama

Director of Underwater Photography
Derrick Chen

First Assistant Camera
Emily Kordovich

Underwater Camera Operator
Lily Mars



Key Grip
Collin Chiucchini

Gaffer
David Persaud

Sound Recorder
Rhea Li
Braulio Lin

Sound Mixer
Sam Beneitone

Choreographer
Kim Brandt

Lifeguard
June Walton

Safety Diver
Miguel Ricci

Driver Liaison
Ishtiaq Ahmad

Underwater Location
Blue Water Divers

Rehearsal Space
Center for Performance Research

Color
Huephoric
For ALL ARTS

Senior Multimedia Producer
Jake King

Executive Producers
Kristy Geslain
Joe Harrell

Senior Artistic Director
James King

Executives in Charge
Diane Masciale
Neal Shapiro

Made possible by ALL ARTS Artist in Residence Program allarts.org @allartstv

All rights reserved Ⓒ 2024 Kenneth


More information at Commonwealth and Council

The Founding of the World takes as its framework the ritual of the probate, originally explored by Tam during a 2020 residency and livestreamed performance with The Kitchen in New York City, organized by Lumi Tan. In these stylized and structured public ceremonies, synchronized choreographies of death and rebirth illustrate the retelling of a brotherhood’s history, the liturgical embodiment of an origin myth. 

Featuring an original score by interdisciplinary artist eddy kwon, the titular video opens with a line-up of young men dressed in red and black. They stand crammed inside a dark wood-paneled room reminiscent of a basement or recreation room, some staring directly at the camera with arms crossed while others fidget with their hands and t-shirts. Together they recreate certain elements of the probate (donning masks, group movement, military-inspired line formations) while inventing others, intermingling acts of violence and tenderness. 

The video installation demarcates a private and ritual-focused experience of sacred space with a quasi-memorial as well. Empty liquor and cologne bottles, objects an adolescent might keep in their bedroom as trophies, hover above the gallery floor on pipes affixed to the ceiling with tactical flashlights illuminating them from below. Their presentation reminds us how these vessels serve ritualistic functions, as products associated with the rite-of-passage into adulthood.

A separate gallery features a new series of Aqua-Resin wall sculptures cast from molded arrangements of hoodies and varsity jackets, common articles of dress in probates. Their dark and spectral formations–resembling coats of arms, ritual tablets, and other heraldic symbols—suggest writhing and wrestling bodies. Together they stand in as the emblems through which fraternities assert presence and dominion in public space. A number of these sculptures have embedded accessories, such as metal watch bands, imitation gold chains, razor blades, handcuff keys, dog tags, and Chinese coins. They speak to the displays of excess, cultural syncretization, and violence associated with the probate and tropes of masculinity more generally.

For Tam, while fraternities are one space in which the idea of Asian America is constituted, their function in many ways serves more as a reflection of the expectations placed on young men in a country that perpetuates and demands harmful performances of masculinity. The installation’s meditation on the ritual movement and consecration of space within the probate—partly taking inspiration and title from the writing in Mircea Eliades in 1957’s The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion—elicits the contradictory forces inscribed within a community’s “founding of the world;” the creation myths through which “the real unveils itself [and] the world comes into existence.” For young Asian American men in these fraternities, the world is constituted through a highly specified and often contradictory performance of gender and race, in which violence is often conflated with intimacy, at times with tragic outcomes. For Tam, the probate is a space where urgent questions about group identity, assimilation and cultural authenticity are asked, and given haunting, physical form.

Production Credits:

New York
Director of Photography: Christian Carroll
Assistant Cameraperson: Vadim Aynbinder
Lighting Designer: Kelley Shih
Assistant Lighting Designer: Xiaoyue Zhang
Choreographer: Juri Onuki
Performers: Huiwang Zhang

Houston
Director of Photography: Tyler Swanner
Gaffer: Esteban Caicedo
Production Assistant:  Dylan Scardino
Location Scout: Chris Lacher
Performers: Daniel Bacuyag, William Chao, Jeffrey Huang, Stephen Hunt, Alan Kim, Alex Kim, Steven Luu

Composer and Vocalist: eddy kwon
Digital Animation: Taylor Shields
3D Rendering: X Art Services/Tellef Tellefson
Colorist: Huephoric
Studio Assistants: Claudia Corujo, Matthew Li
Fabricators: Shisanwu LLC, Rest Energy/Caleb Engstrom, American Fine Arts Foundry

Additional support provided by: The New York State Council on the Arts, UnionDocs Center for Documentary Arts

Photographs by Paul Salveson
More information at Ballroom Marfa

The New York Times
Artforum Critics’ Picks
Hyperallergic
Sculpture Magazine

Kenneth Tam’s solo exhibition Tender is the hand which holds the stone of memory features a series of commissioned sculptures alongside a two-channel video installation. In his exhibition, Tam unearths forgotten histories in order to reimagine our own identities and to question dominant myths that shape and govern our bodies.

Tam’s examination of American westward expansion is rooted in the unrecorded lives of nameless Chinese laborers, who toiled under the most physically arduous conditions in the late nineteenth century. Silent Spikes, the video installation on view at Ballroom, weaves together improvised dialogue and movement sequences from a group of participants, along with semi-fictional scenes of a Chinese worker from inside the tunnels of the Transcontinental Railroad. During Tam’s site visit to West Texas in 2021, his encounter with artifacts and fragments of objects left at workers’ camps along the railroad led him to consider how physical remnants function as stand-ins for the disappeared histories of laborers. Tam’s sculptures suggest other ways of thinking about these men. His use of archaeological fragments as visual and material language complicates the simple narratives that have been constructed about migrant lives. In their lifetimes, Chinese laborers were reviled for their race but praised for their industriousness, their worth as people always tied to their ability to labor. Bits of dried food, broken jewelry and other personal items are integrated into the sculptures to point to experiences of precarity, but also tenderness and care. Physical traces–and even the sounds of the railroad passing through Marfa still today–can serve as reminders of how this nation was built, and by whom.

Tender is the hand which holds the stone of memory is organized by Daisy Nam, Ballroom Marfa Executive Director and Curator with assistance from Alexann Susholtz, Exhibitions and Curatorial Assistant.

Fabricator: Shisanwu LLC, NY

Photographs by Heather Rasmussen

More information at Queens Museum

Art in America
Hyperallergic
The Brooklyn Rail
Frieze
Document Journal
Art Papers
Midnight Moment at Times Square Arts

The two-channel video Silent Spikes uses movement, theatrical staging and historical narrative to question existing ideas about the performance of masculinity, and the way those normative performances become mythologized in figures like the cowboy.  If the cowboy can be understood as shorthand for a set of ideas that says as much about the violent foundations of maleness in the American imagination as it does about how we celebrate the values exemplified by this figure, then where do men of Asian descent find themselves within this representational landscape? And how can sensuousness complicate these performances, and allow for an erotics of both resistance and care?  

The video  incorporates references to a strike that was organized by thousands of these Chinese laborers working in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1867. Interpretative narration of their act of defiance is interwoven with dramatic location imagery and documentation of Tam’s work with five untrained performers. In loosely scored individual and group activities, these participants generate new, unconfined expressions of male selfhood and intimacy.   Through their unscripted collaboration, the artist and his participants honor inherited struggles while centering vulnerability and connection as reparative forms of male embodiment.

Curated by Sophia Marisa Lucas

Commissioned by the Queens Museum with support from the Asian Art Circle of the Guggenheim Museum

Participants: Tyler Chen, Theodore Lee, Virgo Raaz, Alfred Tom, Ahnaf Zitou
Dancer: Andrew Chung
Director of Photography: Christian Carroll
Additional Photography: Camen Hodges
Choreography: Alyssa Forte
Cantonese voiceover and translation: Christopher Sin
Sound Technician: Jeffrey Rowell
Wardrobe Stylist: Daisy De Jesus
Costume Designer: Curie Choi
Fabricator: Francis Louvis

Photographs by Jason Mandella 







More information at The Kitchen OnScreen

An Artist’s View of Hazing Rituals, Haunted by Tragedy - by Dawn Chan for The New York Times

In this new performance, The Crossing, the artist trains his lens onto the rituals of Asian American fraternities, inquiring into the ways they create belonging and identity while also adopting practices that undermine these very bonds. For Tam, these organizations offer a way for young men to negotiate the pressures of assimilation while constructing normative identities based on race and gender. These forces find symbolic urgency in the elaborate ceremonies staged by these young men, and such rites of initiation suggest the power performance has in maintaining dominant social structures and hierarchies.  

Asian American fraternities were founded in part to educate their members about historic Asian oppression by offering consciousness raising around contemporary anti-Asian racism. They provide a close-knit community that uplifts young men as they navigate life away from their families and acclimate to college environments that are often defined by white ideals of success. But these communities can also expose pledges to violence and trauma through their initiation rites—an aspect brought to light in the tragic case of Michael Deng, a freshman at Baruch College who in 2013 died while being hazed. Tam’s performance probes how multicultural fraternities represent the search for male intimacy, the way masculinity is used to negotiate cultural identity, and the ritualization of violence within all-male spaces.
For The Crossing, Tam will work with a group of performers to create a piece that pulls from the structure and choreography of highly stylized probates—the public unveiling of new fraternity pledges. Recognizing the symbolism of these ceremonies as a type of rebirth—the erasure of one identity and the emergence of a new one within the context of the fraternity—Tam will also look to Taoist funeral rites, ceremonies that shift the focus away from death and onto the value of life and caretaking by spirits. 

Curated by Lumi Tan

Performers: Martin Richard Borromeo, James Lim, Paulina Meneses, Resa Mishina
Lighting Designer: Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew
Contributing Choreographer: Alyssa Forte
Sound Supervisor: Ian Douglas-Moore
Video Supervisor: Ross Karre
Camera operators: Adele Fournet, Merve Kayan, Felipe Wurst
COVID-19 Supervisor and Stage Manager: Randi Rivera
Lighting and Production Assistance: Mike Faba
Costume Production: Curie Choi
Photographs by ©Paula Court

In the installation All of M, the high school prom becomes the vehicle to examine the role of social ritual in forming male identity and the physical trappings that enable sites of male homosocial belonging. The prom is understood as a coming-of-age event where adolescents dress up and perform as adults for one night, ritualistically marking the movement from one stage of life to another.  A diverse group of high school seniors and adult men are brought together to enact a different version of the prom.   Their participation in this re-performance speaks to the anxieties tied to normative gender expression, while also pointing towards possibilities for re-imagining both this ritual and themselves.   The inner-tubes filled with sand function as bodily surrogates in the video, and larger versions reappear as sculptures in the installation. Their origins from the world of DIY gym equipment videos circulated on Youtube contrast with their languid and eroticized presentation. Taken together, All of M presents an opportunity to see the performance of male subjectivity as contingent and open to change.  

Participants
Darnell Dudley
Chris Rehmann
Paul Revels
Daniel Tavares
Anwar Toktaraov
Dennis Williams
Marcus Vazzano
Anonymous
Director of Photography
Pascual Sisto
Lighting
Christian Carroll
DJ
Curtis Greaves aka Mix Mello

Special thanks to the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Bora Kim and Wojciech Gilewic

Installation views at SculptureCenter, 2019.   Photos by Phoebe d’Heurle
The various activity-based groups that men create for socializing provided the point of departure for Breakfast in Bed (2016). The project began by recruiting seven non-actors to participate in a mock men's social club, the activities of which were filmed in a constructed set. Part social experiment, part absurdist theater, Breakfast in Bed is organized around the constructions of masculinity and the male body through role-playing, team-building exercises, and improvised actions that was developed with the participants throughout the process under my loose direction. Through staged play, the video examines the constructed identities that the men come to rely on in a group setting while enabling and facilitating their agency to perform themselves in front of the camera.

 Artists at Work - Conversation with Natilee Harren

Conversation with Bruce Hainley
sump (2015) documents a series of invented rituals between my father and I. Shot in the basement of his current home, sump explores the fraught space we both occupy, and uses our bodies as a way to examine the interpersonal tensions that exist in the Asian father/son relationship. Our wordless exchanges typify the way we have come to communicate through acts of silence.