Empty Gallery is pleased to present There Must Be More To Life Than Having Everything, our second exhibition with Hong Kong-based artist Vunkwan Tam.

Originating from a popular children’s book, Tam’s choice of title takes on a different resonance in the context of his own continued exploration of the charged psychosocial residues of semiocapital—providing a kind of skeleton key with which we might approach his exhibition. Taking after psychoanalysis in suggesting that our most seemingly natural and fundamental desires might be irreparably flawed, he shifts between the perspectives of critical custodian, archaeologist, and undertaker in relation to the reproduction and circulation of these desires. Surveying the collection of found texts, objects, and affects which constitute the compositional elements of Tam’s sculptural palimpsests, we might say that his entire practice emerges from the obverse or remainder of cultural life—the “more” in relation to his titular “everything”. Through…