Ho Tam

Inspired by a collection of personal notebooks, this feature-length director’s cut of the short film by the same name is an experimental documentary on art, AIDS and activism. Following James Wentzy from South Dakota to New York City, the film traces his days from struggling and surviving as an artist to later becoming an AIDS video activist. In showcasing a unique individual through his involvement with the fight against AIDS and his tireless frontline reportage of the crisis, The Books of James is an intimate portrait of a neglected everyman/hero and unearths a time now forgotten.

Shot at the Chinatown Basketball Tournament in New York City, August 1997 when the video maker stumbled upon by chance. Season of the Boys is about the myth of a "boy-season" that all men have been waiting for, which comes just once and only for a brief moment. The video documents the Asian boys who can jump, or at least pass the ball. Living between Black and White Americans, the yellow boys attempts to negotiate a space for themselves. Mixing unlikely subjects of athletics, voyeuristic desire and poetic expression, Season of the Boys explores how the culture of youth and beauty is constructed and influences us from an intimate viewpoint of the video maker.

Through a stack of personal journals, this video reconstructs a biography of the South Dakota-born, New York City-enlightened artist James Wentzy. Tracing his days starting out as a struggling artist and later involved as an AIDS activist, the video provides an intimate portrait of a neglected hero.

Originally made for "Illicit Acts", a program curated by Stephen Kent Jusick for New York MIX Festival 1998, Washington Heights Untitled is a short experimental documentary on the local community where the artist is residing. Under the administration of New York City Mayor Guiliani, blockades were set up by the NYPD in many blocks to prevent drug trafficking. Capturing the essence of the Dominican neighborhood, the video documents and comments on the changes in the community and the horror of possibly becoming a "police state".

Arranged from A to Z in 26 segments, the video looks at the relationship between image and text. In a playful and satirical manner, it roams through past and present of the Asian experience within North America and beyond, from the Chinese railroad laborers, Hiroshima and the Korean War, to the arrivals of the Boat People and the Hong Kong money. Both simplistic and complex in its presentation, The Yellow Pages seeks to interact with the viewers, never allowing one single reading.

On a trip to Hong Kong, Ho Tam was cruised by an attractive young man at the airport. He was in the police force and also knew how to play a Chinese instrument (and play it well). He was a child prodigy who had performed around the world, but now made his living as both a businessman and a policeman (part-time). Ho Tam asked for a performance.

99 out of focus pictures of men in glasses, suits, and ties, all from Chinese American newspapers. Visual artist Ho Tam clipped these images over a period of five years. The pictures tell the generic and personal stories of men who make a living selling and a story of the artist who collected them.

Compiled with footage of storefronts of beauty parlors and barber shops from Chinatown and the Lower East Side in New York City, the video takes the viewer into the hair culture of the Chinese American community. Accompanied by a soundtrack of “Heart Sutra” chanting from a Buddhist monastery, Hair Cuts explores the interior of human hearts through the architectural mapping of sites seen.