Kim’s essay on Kenneth Tam’s “Silent Spikes” reframes the American West through Asian American fabulation, a theme he continues in his forthcoming book “Asian Accents.”
Tufts University Art Galleries has recommended Professor Jongwoo Jeremy Kim’s Cowboy (co-authored by Abrams, Lash, et al.) as a resource for research on Chinese railroad workers and the American West. In the book, Kim celebrates his Asian American writing voice and focuses on Kenneth Tam’s Silent Spikes (2021). This video installation interweaves a fantasy about Asian American cowboys with an investigation into the nineteenth-century history of Chinese labor in the United States.
Kim describes Silent Spikes as a form of fabulation for pan-Asian communities in America, “neither fully truthful nor completely fictional,” but engaged in a “mythmaking function” that casts a “shadow” over familiar narratives of intelligence, imagination, and reason. Tam challenges these all-encompassing metaphors of Western civilization because they continue to reassert only the majority “tradition as the locus of enunciation” and affirm the West as the authorized framework through which knowledge is put together into words. Against this stale history of canonical narratives, Tam interpellates the Asian American Western as a new site for loving human connections and meaning.
Kim will continue his research on Asian American art in his next book, Asian Accents, which he will complete during his fellowship at the Clark Art Institute in 2026.