I Am Kenneth Tam

For Tam, Asian American fraternities contradict the Asian cultural values and heritage they claim to uphold in their embrace of the violent ritualized traditions of hazing within American culture. Under the guise of fraternal solidarity, these acts of violence are meant to symbolize the struggles of Asian men in America. “The Crane and the Snake,” Tam’s multichannel video and sculptural installation, investigates how these antagonistic cultural forces affect the body, especially for young fraternity brothers as they search for self-identity and male belonging under the pressures of assimilation. This project continues the artist’s larger interest in the private practices and rituals used to create belonging in all-male groups and uses Taoist principles of simultaneously opposing forces, as in the concept of yin and yang, to reimagine abusive initiation rites in order to redirect their violent energy to other ends.