Vunkwan Tam

Vunkwan Tam employs a range of media, including sculpture, video, text, sound, and installation, to explore themes associated with death, decay, and the malaise of late-stage capitalism. Tam's artistic practice can be likened to found poetry or cento, in which he arranges groupings of pre-existing objects and linguistic fragments, often sourced from online platforms, to construct condensed spatial narratives. These fugitive arrangements, which are sensitive to their surroundings and often improvised, repurpose the decontextualized material of semiocapitalism in order to conduct an excavation of communal affect. Tam's work operates within the slippery realm of internet culture, which is characterised by a fusion of irony, hyperbole, and half-truths. A notable example of Tam's approach is his work 78i78 (2022), which features a bedraggled L-shaped blanket lying on the floor serving as a metaphor for the dramatised emotional wallowing often associated with contemporary culture.