About
Towards the Dichotomies In-Between Nature-Culture... Walking Along the River/ On the Road/ In the City …

This practice-based research has been initiated from Smithson’s “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” (Smithson, 1967) that employs the term “toxic discourse” (Buell, 1998) and “dialectical landscape” (James, 1973) to explore and expand the dichotomous extremes from “Nature versus Culture” to “Landscape (object) versus Cityscape (subject)”. Referring to the thoughts from Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Jean Baudelaire (1844-1866), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), Robert Smithson (1938-1973), Richard Long (b.1945), Michel de Certeau (1925-1986), Brian Dillon (b.1969), and Rebecca Solnit (b.1961), “Walking/ Flaneur” would be explained and coined Walking as Creative Reflections and Outcomes for creative/ literary/ philosophical thoughts.
This PhD thesis mainly consists of THREE research aspects: “Walking Along the River/ On the Road/ In the City…” that demonstrate “Walking/ Flâneur” as a significant artistic-interventive tactics to further explain and illustrate as interceptive/ interactive/ interpretative praxis to contextualize “Towards the Dichotomies In-Between Nature-Culture”.
“Walking Along the River” (the Nature) is initiatively investigating from the Old and New, and the Chinese and Western visual language from the epistemology/ ontology/ genealogy of landscape/ earthwork/ environmental art/ moving image. A most significant and crucial example could be well illustrated by Richard Long’s A Line Made by “Walking” (1967) that documented and recorded the creative reflections and outcomes within the landscape and cityscape contexts (Nature-Culture-bound).
“On the Road/ In the City…” (the Culture) interrogates on Cosmopolitan Urbanism that are inspired from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and de Certeau’s Walking in the City (1984) that develops a controversial platform as critical documentation for Modernization and Urbanization in term of cityscape. It involves an objective-nature-rural-life to a subjective-culture-urban-experience that exemplifies to scholarly interrogation of Dualisms/ Dichotomies “Walking Along-On-In” as the preposition of NatureCultures (as Human vs Non-human, Haraway, 2003) or Nature/Culture (Latour, 2017) on biocultural and sociocultural contexts.
This dichotomous statement is going to be referred and formulated as fundamentals and grounds to the contribution of knowledge: Moving Image as Hybrid Ideas, in which will be explored/ hypothesized/ testified/ criticized via the documentation/ contextualization/ dissemination from Art Praxis.
Looking forward to seeing you.
Andy Tam (MA, MEd, ARPS)
PhD Researcher
Dept. of Fine Art, Kingston School of Art
Contemporary Art Research Centre (CARC)
Kingston University London
K1812983@kingston.ac.uk
Selected Exhibitions
-We Are Publication” Multi-media Exhibition (2019). Dekalb Gallery, Pratt Institute, New York.
-“the Hold” Multi-media Exhibition (2019). Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University, London.
-Painting and Multi-media Exhibition (2018). Affordable Art Fair, Hong Kong.
-Description of Absence (2018). 1Aa Artspace Jeju, Korea.
-Silk Road International Art Festival (2017). Xian Art Museum, China.
-Urbanism/ Architecture Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/ Architecture (2016). Shenzhen Municipal Committee, China.
-The 3rd Kumming Art Biennale (2016). Yunnan Fine Art Museum, China.
-UFO Art Exhibition of Glocal Communication (2013). F1 Fang Li Jun Artspace, Hong Kong.
-The 7th Tashkent International Biennale of Contemporary Art (2013). Uzbekistan.
-Beyond: an extraordinary space of experimentation for modernization (2006). The 2nd Guangzhou Triennial, China.
Publications
-Tam, T. K. et al (2016). On the Stream: Southeast Asian Contemporary Art, Yunnan Fine Art Museum, China.
-Tam, T. K. et al (2016). The 1st Shenzhen Biennale of Contemporary Art, Art Planning Committee of Shenzhen Artists Associations, China.
-Tam, T K. (2015) “In Between Institution and Market- the role of media art and infrastructure in the era of post-regional integration”, An International Conference Exploring Creative Research and Practice in Museum Making, K11 Art Foundation, UKT1 and the University of Leicester
Short biography of andydada
Andy Tat-keung TAM (Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Hong Kong Art critic and cultural Industry Researcher) Graduated at the University of the Arts London, Wimbledon College of Art. He also participates in the projects of International Festival of Intermedia (2020), Affordable Art Fair Hong Kong (2018), Silk Road International Art Festival (2017), The 3rd Kunming Art Biennale (2016), Shenzhen Biennale of Contemporary Art (2015), Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/ Architecture (Shenzhen and Hong Kong (2012 & 2015)), Kwangju Art Biennial (2005), Guangzhou Art Triennial (2005), MAAP Media Art Festival (2004), Ho Chi Minh Fine Arts Museum (2000), Taiwan IT Park Gallery (2000), Taiwan Huashan Arts District (2000), Hong Kong Biennale of Art (1996 & 1998) etc. He also performed at Malaysia National Visual Arts Gallery (2000) etc, and his art writings were released in MIT-LEA Press, 2nd APAEC (Asia-Pacific Art Education Conference), 2nd Guangzhou triennial, Korean National Commission for UNESCO etc