Recently on view at Bridget Donahue Gallery, the Queens-born artist's solo exhibition is a multimedia intervention on broken dreams and the taxi medallion crisis
When I walked into Kenneth Tam’s exhibition The Medallion at Bridget Donahue Gallery, I first noticed how careful my steps were, and how aware of them I was. The gallery floor was transformed by Tam, now blanketed with approximately 370 beaded mats, each made from 100 wooden beads. The mats were imitations of the drivers seat covers found in New York City yellow cabs. Nowadays, cab drivers, who are often South Asian immigrants, install the seat covers to alleviate the physical discomfort of prolonged seating. At the gallery, to endure visitors’ footsteps, the beaded mats are tightly compacted, yet arranged loosely enough that each bead can still move under visitors’ shoes. I quickly learned how my steps created reverberations and aftershocks, adjusting my footfalls accordingly. “Be mindful,” I thought to myself. “No stomping.” Exactly as one does at a scene of ruins.
The Medallion is more than an exhibit, it is a story about the circulation of the taxi medallion—a costly permit issued by the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission that gives a driver the right to legally operate a yellow taxi in New York City. The story is a tragic one. Though he is now based in Houston, Tam is originally from Queens, home to many of the immigrant drivers caught up in economic nightmares caused by medallions. Tam speaks near his subject, maintaining a critical distance between how drivers’ lives unraveled and viewers’ desire for knowing more. The exhibition staged a scenography of appropriated and reproduced car parts that reference the story of affected drivers by proxy. For those unfamiliar, here is how the story goes: many immigrant taxi drivers signed exploitative loan contracts to purchase medallions which are in limited supply and assumed to appreciate in value over time. However, when ride-sharing apps such as Uber and Lyft came along, profit margins in the taxi business dwindled, curtailing drivers’ loan repayment ability and depreciating the value of medallions. Now, the medallion, once a symbol of class aspiration and mobility, has become a lethal burden, drowning many taxi drivers in severe debt, forcing them to declare bankruptcy. Some even died by suicide.
