Kenneth Tam - Silent Spikes

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? 

A major component of the video reflects on the entangled histories of Westward expansion and Chinese immigration, examining how they shape cultural myths and collective memory. Through a two-channel video installation and accompanying photographs, Kenneth Tam explores the performance of masculinity—how it is constructed, codified, and mythologized in the iconic trope of the cowboy.

References are made to the 1867 strike by Chinese railroad workers in the Sierra Nevada Mountains—one of the largest labour actions in U.S. history. Between the 1840s and 1870s, Chinese workers played a critical yet often overlooked role in constructing two transcontinental railways: the Central Pacific in the United States and the Pacific Railway in Canada. These histories are evoked through interpretive narration and filmed sequences shot in the abandoned tunnels of Northern California—monumental voids carved into the landscape by these workers, now haunting symbols of erasure and endurance.

In the making of Silent Spikes, Tam worked with a group of untrained Asian American men, inviting them into a collaborative and unscripted process. Some don cowboy attire and echo the gestures of rodeo riders, while others engage in loosely scored solo and group activities that blur the boundary between roleplay and self-expression. Through this process, new and expansive expressions of male identity emerge—shaped by tenderness, resistance, and emotional complexity. Through their unscripted collaboration, the artist and his participants honour inherited struggles while centring vulnerability and connection as reparative forms of male embodiment. 

Curated by Kanika Anand