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Kenneth Tam
The Founding of the World

In a dimly lit, wood-paneled space reminiscent of a basement recreation room, eight young Asian men, clad in red t-shirts and black pants, stand in a line staring at the camera. Their heads tilt, necks stretched, arms crossed and half-crossed, hands in and out of their pockets. Their anticipatory bodies find their bearings towards stillness. Their fidgety stance launches a ritualized sequence inspired by the probate, the presentation show of new members in fraternities and sororities, the network of social organizations in U.S. universities. Kenneth Tam’s Founding of the World is a psychological examination of individual and collective social choreographies, probing Asian American masculinity and identity. 

Probates originate from African American fraternities and sororities and have been adopted by other organizations of color. Drawing from initiation hazing rituals, such as mask donning, synchronized movements, and military-inspired line formations, these scenes are intercut with a solo dancer’s choreography, bathed in blue, yellow, red, green, and purple. Kenneth Tam revisits choreographic passages explored during his livestreamed performance, The Crossing (2020), for The Kitchen, New York, during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, as conversations amplified on the construction of masculinity amidst the wave of anti-Asian sentiment. Speaking of the 2013 death of a fraternity pledge at an Asian American fraternity at Baruch College, New York, Tam notes in a New York Times article by Dawn Chan that “you’re just taking these oppressive models found in the military or other sorts of places that are about destroying individual identity in order to embolden the group.”

A sonic score by vocalist and interdisciplinary artist eddy kwon, who describes their work as a “ceremony to explore transformation and transgression,” composed with guttural syncopation and breath work, accompanies slow-motion scenes of young men wrestling, force-feeding, and exalting, embodying the narratives of death, rebirth, and original myth that sustain these fraternities. Aerial scenes of a 3D-rendering of the Washington Square Arch monument in New York City, the de facto social center of New York University and lower Manhattan, are slowly deconstructed.

Working at the intersection of photography, sculpture, and video, U.S.-born Chinese American artist Kenneth Tam explores facets of American popular cultural and social histories as a lens to elucidate the formation of Asian and queer identities. Tam choreographs time-based work, such as movement, dance, and performance and its documentation to address the evolving relationship between individual and collective, between ritual and truth-seeking.