Tommy Kha

Interview by Dawn Chan

Tommy Kha is an artist pushing the boundaries of photography. Currently based in Brooklyn, New York, and Memphis, Tennessee (where he was born), the photographer uses various materials—from dye-sublimated fleece to Bubblegrams—to depict a multitude of subjects: scenes of shrines in Asian-American restaurants, Southern landscapes, images of family members. According to New Yorker critic Johanna Fateman, the artist’s images often have “a tenderly sunlit strain of Lynchian surrealism that brings his themes of dislocation, domesticity, identity, and masquerade into gorgeous, supersaturated relief.” Kha, who received his MFA at Yale University, is a recipient of the 2023 Center for Photography at Woodstock’s Vision Award, a 2022 NYFA Photography Fellowship, and the 2021 Next Step Award. His book, Half, Full, Quarter, was published by Aperture this year.

Dawn Chan (DC): We’ve been in conversation for a while now, already. We worked together earlier this year on your solo show at Baxter Street Camera Club, that you and the team kindly brought me in to curate.

Tommy Kha (TK): Yes. Actually I think we started working together sometime around last August at the Baxter Street Camera Club of New York. It was a show paired with Aperture’s Next Step Award. I knew the book for that award was going to be done before we finalized a curator. But I also knew that the show wouldn’t necessarily be a direct translation of the book. The book could be on its own thing for the time being, and find a wider audience. In contrast, the Camera Club was in Chinatown, and while we were making this book and hopping on to exhibition planning, there was a wave of anti-Asian hate crimes. Really terrible things were happening to the elderly and the vulnerable people of our communities. And it was just such a weird thing for me to be making a book that is very autobiographical, and then do a show that was supposed to be a celebration of that. I couldn’t get past the context of what was going on. So I think that led to our first idea: to really focus on the theme of community. And the first piece conceived was the floor piece: dye sublimation on fleece.

DC: It was an image of food, laid out on newspapers, no? I loved how unapologetically you had the piece take up space on the floor. There was even an idea early on that you’d have visitors to your opening take off their shoes—which got scrapped for logistical reasons.

View of “Ghost Bites,” 2023

Courtesy of the artist and taken by Lloyd McCullough at Baxter Street at the Camera Club of New York

TK: I developed the floor piece based on my family’s practice of placing newsprints on the floor when we’d gather to eat. We still do that now. We can finally afford nice tablecloths, but we still recycle newspapers.

For the show, I was able to expand into the cafe project space and delve into the idea of community by inviting people from the Asian diasporic community to photograph their experiences, to photograph their ideas of community. And we just overlaid all our prints together.

Fast forward a few months and we’re doing the show, which was at the end of a marathon of shows last year. It was nice to take the opportunity to pay homage, be appreciative, and to highlight the community that’s the basis of my work. Despite its autobiographical context, it always has this connection to the other people I’m surrounded by.

"For the show [at Baxter Street], I was able to expand into the cafe project space and delve into the idea of community by inviting people from the Asian diasporic community to photograph their experiences, to photograph their ideas of community. And we just overlaid all our prints together."

DC: How were you thinking about picking the photos you selected for the Aperture book? Is community also an element? What were you choosing for that volume, leaving out, or saving for other shows, and why?

TK: It was the first book I got to work on over time with Leslie A. Martin, and Studio Lin, who design some of my favorite art books. We ended up mixing around four different bodies of work. There was a darker context, earlier on: the murder of my aunt outside of Nashville back in the late 1990s. It all became a little too specific too quickly. I was reading Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s "Dictee" at the time, so we decided to delve into the bigger picture behind my family’s immigration instead. Parallel to some of the pictures that appear in the book were images used in the Baxter Street show: Chinese restaurants, Vietnamese temples, and things that really marked the Southern landscape with our presence. Meanwhile, officially, the city of Memphis never kept records of immigrants or settlers from China. One of my friends is retired and conducts her own research on Memphis Chinese communities. She found a profile of the first early settler from China who came through Memphis and based his operations on Beale Street. The only way she figured it out was through a newspaper ad for a laundry business, dated in 1873.

DC: This was the earliest Chinese immigrant to Memphis?

TK: Yeah. And just looking at the last spike of the Transcontinental Railroad: that was in 1869. We still don’t know if this immigrant was necessarily the first. But this year is the 150th anniversary of his laundry business opening its doors. The presence goes way back.

"Officially, the city of Memphis never kept records of immigrants or settlers from China. One of my friends is retired and conducts her own research on Memphis Chinese communities. She found a profile of the first early settler from China who came through Memphis and based his operations on Beale Street. The only way she figured it out was through a newspaper ad for a laundry business, dated in 1873."

View of “Ghost Bites,” 2023

Courtesy of the artist and taken by Lloyd McCullough at Baxter Street at the Camera Club of New York

DC: So you mentioned you had, and have, several bodies of work going on simultaneously. Can you break them down for us?

TK: Yes, though it’s important to note that I do see all the pictures I have as part of one long, ongoing body of work. I just compartmentalize a lot—in my real life as well. It’s okay. I’m in therapy for it. So there are pictures from a collaboration between my mom and me called “Half Self Portraits” collectively—the set of images mixes our collaboration with photographs that my mom made. Only recently­—maybe five years into our collaboration­—she surprisingly gifted me with pictures she took in the 1980s in Canada. There are also Southern landscapes. Then there’s my main body of work: facades, which work with my cutout image as if it’s a photograph of a photograph, or a very soft collage. I don’t Photoshop.

DC: Why not?

TK: I don’t have time for it. I do use Photoshop so much already for work.

DC: What do you mean for work?

TK: My freelance gigs, doing retouching and editing.

DC: I see. So there are—

TK: Southern landscapes. The cutouts. Canada in 1984, and the “Half Self Portraits.” Technically, some of the structure of the book is more open-ended, or a continuous progression. It’s almost like a yearbook, or maybe more like a marker, or a time capsule.

Mine IX, Den(tist Room), Whitehaven, Memphis, 2017

Pigment print

36 x 45 in.

Courtesy the artist and Higher Pictures

DC: In the show we worked on together, you used the floor very deliberately for that fleece-blanket photograph we talked about earlier. Meanwhile, in another show, you mounted work to the ceiling, with hundreds of photos put together into an eye-like form, right? Can you talk about that?

TK: That ceiling installation was at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art as part of the Tennessee Triennial that opened in January. I was working with a lot of residual ideas from 2019 or earlier, and then when the pandemic hit, the world suddenly paused. And so I had to shift from staged and situational, improvisational strategies in my photography to a really confined, studio-based approach. A lot of the collages that emerged are included in the book as well. I guess that’s another body of work: the collages. They reiterate the cardboard cutouts that I was already working with; even the 3-D printed masks that make up my facades echoed things that I had been doing.

DC: What were you hoping to do with the Tennessee Triennial piece?

May (a Costume Drama), Whitehaven, Memphis, 2019

Pigment print

36 x 45 in.

Courtesy the artist and Higher Pictures

TK: It was a new approach­—or maybe not so new, honestly. I’d already been creating photo mosaics out of all these pictures: like Southern signage, and shrines, a few of which are published in the book as well. Shrines were the through line at “Ghost Bites,” installed in a row. At the Brooks Museum, the accumulations on the ceiling were various cloud pictures. I guess I was thinking of Eggleston and Sophia Coppola’s Virgin Suicides intro, which I think was based on or inspired by Eggleston’s “Zenith” pictures. It was more about photographing a really good-looking cloud at first, and then it just kept going. But I thought it would be amazing to look at the ceiling as an Oculus and form it into an eye. Especially when I had the opportunity to install very different materials alongside it that aren’t necessarily pictures but are reminiscent of them, like the faux grass that I had installed on the floor. People are welcome to lie in it.

DC: You installed the fake grass on site as part of the work?

TK: Yes. And it’s in patches too, because I love the almost Frankensteined way of putting things together to echo the photo mosaic.

DC: What is a good-looking cloud to you? Like what sorts of clouds were included? Were they all from Southern skies?

TK: It started out that way, but became a performance or an exercise I gave myself: photograph any cool, good-looking cloud. Often, it would be magic hour. Sometimes I’d photograph from a plane above the clouds. And I wondered: is this all a way for me to get into abstraction? I hope not. I don’t know. I’m trying to find fun in making all these kinds of different pictures.

View of “Ghost Bites,” 2023

Courtesy of the artist and taken by Lloyd McCullough at Baxter Street at the Camera Club of New York

DC: Your work’s led to a flurry of media coverage over the past several months. I mean, you’ve always received press, but I’m curious if it’s reached an inflection point, and whether seeing others’ words put towards your work feels different now.

TK: It’s always a good opportunity to be able to talk about the photographs and find new synonyms for what I’m thinking. I think everything I do is in an iteration of itself, so I’m very comfortable being mindful of that. And I’m very grateful. But it’s complicated: Last year, during the controversy I found myself in with Elvis fans—a small group of racist Elvis fans—all that led to a lot of attention at once. I didn’t feel I deserved that kind of attention. I didn’t want that controversy to be part of my narrative. I just want to make something beautiful.

DC: You’d created a photo of yourself with a cutout showing yourself dressed as Elvis. And when it was installed in the Memphis airport, suddenly a group of vocal Elvis fans—who were somehow affronted by the image of an Asian person dressed as Elvis—made a lot of noise, to the point where the airport temporarily censored the work. And it sounds like things got complicated for you, too.

TK: Yeah, a lot of personal boundaries were crossed. People found my phone number and it was just a lot to deal with. I’m actually very grateful for it, for all of it. I hope I handled it well. I love talking to people and continuing to have these discussions. Especially things that are difficult: that deal with censorship, or with topics like the treatment of ourselves, our work, and how we value ourselves. I think that whole controversy was very necessary to have, because it made me evaluate things that were outside of my comfort zone.

DC: Like what?

TK: Censorship, racism, and seeing that playing out in real time, with people watching what was happening.

DC: On the topic of racism—and people responding very vocally to your work—there was actually another very unsettling incident that happened at your Baxter Street opening. Can we talk about that incident? And the response? Because most media coverage around art can follow a certain formula: you speak with a journalist about your work in an exhibition, and your work only, and then the interview gets published, and then the show opens. But this work is about community, and community reception: what happens after the opening, or during the opening.

TK: Let’s talk about it. Were you there when it happened?

DC: I was downstairs.

TK: Talk to me about your experience of it—

DC: I was actually downstairs in the basement charging my phone. So I didn’t have a clear look at exactly what happened. Just that in the middle of the chatter, the whole upstairs got really quiet, very suddenly, so that there was a single voice, yelling. The phrase “This is Chinese rapture bullshit” jumped out, for some reason. And in this day and age, when a room grows completely silent and there’s suddenly just one voice yelling, you wonder: Is violence next? Are there going to be gunshots next?

TK: I actually only witnessed the aftermath of it. Mostly because I was in the middle of an opening. I did notice this woman sitting in the windowsill for the majority of it. And she seemed to be engaging with people, while I was in the adjacent space. But I think once she stepped outside, that was when all of it went down, when things started being yelled. One thing someone heard was that I was ruining Eggleston’s legacy. And that the show was “just disgusting.”

DC: I heard that too.

TK: And it went on to racist epithets being thrown at me. But then people around her were pushing back, saying things like, “Do you understand where you are right now? Like, this is in Chinatown?” After it happened, she asked me if I was having a really good time. And I didn’t know she’d been the person yelling, so I didn’t register her snark towards me. I was like, “Yeah, I’m doing great. I hope you’re doing well.” I found out later that Justine Kurland had intervened and kicked her out.

DC: Huh.

TK: While I didn’t witness it, it was people in my proximity, especially my friends of color, who ended up having to deal with this for me. I’m so grateful for my communities and the protection of people who just are outright anti-racist.

And it sucks that I don’t see a lot of artists talk about those things. I know this happens, but what is the context? I don’t know how to be able to talk to my students about this. But to be out in this world and to be trying to honor my Asian community—to put on a show that you and I both worked really hard on—and then, for all that to be marred by a woman who just decided to hurl racist words towards everyone?

DC: But the intervention was so wonderful, whoever it was. It felt like this incredibly welcome, authoritative, clear voice, landing in the middle of everything. A voice that said: “This is a really beautiful show and we’re all here to celebrate Tommy’s work and have a good time. And if you’re not on board with that, you should leave.” It was such a measured, present, de-escalating response. It wasn’t meant to provoke. But it didn’t avoid anything either. Whoever spoke up: I will remember your words for a very, very long time.

TK: Yeah, even with the airport controversy, I really think back to the community response: so many people I hadn’t talked to in years came out to offer their full support, emailing the mayor, or getting on phone calls with the Elvis estate. And then fast forwarding almost a year later to this other incident? It just doesn’t surprise me anymore. Every day there’s the question of how the community responds: that is probably what really gives me a lot of gratitude, but also hope. And my main thing becomes trying to figure out how to help other artists, other younger people, and other communities, to feel this kind of support as well.

View of “Ghost Bites,” 2023

Courtesy of the artist and taken by Lloyd McCullough at Baxter Street at the Camera Club of New York

DC: Yeah. It also struck me that your work was already trying to address the context of anti-Asian racism. And sometimes a frustration I have with the idea of an artist or a writer, or any kind of a cultural producer, is that there’s this sense that they’re removed and observing, making work that helps shine a light on the racism experienced by others. But that moment at your opening was a reminder that no one’s ever just an observer of their own community. Photographers and documentarians and makers are just as—

TK: Susceptible.

DC: Yes. It’s striking, too, how there’s something parallel in the people ranting about you and Elvis and the person ranting about you and Eggleston. It seems impossible for these rabble-rousing antagonists to wrap their mind around the notion that your work could be something respectful to Elvis, or Eggleston. No matter what you do, they can’t see it as homage. They read any engagement you have with Elvis, or Eggleston, as disrespectful or ruinous.

TK: The Elvis fans were always characterizing my otherness, my Asianness, when they were saying that Elvis was deserving of a respectful representation. So unpacking what they meant by a respectful representation was the shorthand that I’m not white.

I thought I wouldn’t have to address any of it, but then, when it becomes something bigger than yourself, you can’t help but be called to arms, too. There is something deeper at stake that goes beyond whatever frivolous thing I’m trying to do with picture-making. But yeah, it was enough that my work was taken down, affected by people deciding what art can and cannot be. I don’t know a lot of artists that have experienced censorship at that level. Did you know that first print was destroyed?

"I thought I wouldn’t have to address any of it, but then, when it becomes something bigger than yourself, you can’t help but be called to arms, too. There is something deeper at stake that goes beyond whatever frivolous thing I’m trying to do with picture-making."

DC: I didn’t.

TK: When the airport took it down, it was destroyed. I don’t think a lot of people realized that. And a year and a half later, no one got fired. No one was punished. Things did work out for me, but it took away so much attention from the other amazing 60 plus artists in the show. And there’s no guarantee that it won’t happen again. You know, Memphis has a lot of retrograde attitudes. Like they painted over certain public murals by “mistake.” They had beef with Birdcap’s mural of Black history and Black figures of Memphis. Some deemed the mural “too Black”—and this is for a city that is majority Black.

DC: When these incidents have happened to you personally, do they prompt you to think along the lines of what specifically in your artwork is triggering to these people who are responding so angrily? Or is it not even worth thinking about that? I mean, there’s so much artwork, broadly in New York City, and certainly in Chinatown, that is about identity and communities of color, or immigrant communities. There’s so much. So, why you? I mean, I see a thousand things every day in New York that could provoke ire.

TK: I’m not sure, myself. That Elvis picture hanging in the airport was from 2017, and no one said anything then! It definitely has to do with something with, well, display. You know, at first the work was just about silly pictures. It wasn’t even planned out: I thought the whole photograph on a view camera was more blasphemous towards the tradition of the still life! I’m pretty sure people wouldn’t usually think to use a view camera to photograph a cardboard cut-out of themselves. The whole thing is silly. I think art-making should be fun; a way of processing things. But yeah, I didn’t have any idea the image of myself dressed as Elvis would ruffle any feathers: it literally didn’t register with people when I first did it. So I don’t understand why at a later point, people wanted to say something.

Other than the context of its display—and all that you might think that the word implies. As for the work itself: I’m really just doing my own thing. Making my own work, using myself. Making things out of nothing.

DC: So what form does all this take, in your current output? What are you thinking about these days? Are you continuing these several bodies of work we talked about earlier? Or going in new directions?

TK: I always feel like I’m a little cautious when talking about new work—hinting, if that’s OK. So there’s more of what I’ve always been doing: more photo collages, hopefully another mosaic. More floor pieces—or pictures on the floor. Photographs of my grandmother: she has early signs of dementia. So this new kind of fragmentation as the idea of memory deteriorating. I’m trying to transform a few of the pictures I made of her garden in the backyard. One has a blue tarp, which is a great backdrop. So I am returning to the backdrop again: making photographs into backdrops. More jigsaw puzzles too, and more lenticulars. I just really want to maximize ways the photograph can look, but also to cut them up too. I’m also preparing for a few shows over the next year, which includes “Truth Told Slant” at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta at the end of next year. I’d love to figure out a studio situation and look into doing a road trip. Dividing my time teaching and expanding my editorial work—I’m quite excited to work with more Asian and queer subjects.

Dawn Chan is a New York-based writer whose writing frequently appears in the New York Times and Artforum, where she worked as an editor from 2007 to 2018. You can also find her journalism and essays in the Atlantic.com, Bookforum, the New Yorker.com, New York Magazine, and the Paris Review, among other publications. Currently faculty at CCS Bard, Dawn has guest-lectured at RISD, MICA, and NYU and the Guggenheim Museum. She is the recipient of a Thoma Foundation art writing award in digital art and a Warhol Arts Writers Grant. Her writing appears in anthologies such as Science Fiction (Whitechapel/MIT Press, 2020) and Best, Letters from Asian Americans in the Arts (Paper Monument, 2021). With four colleagues, Dawn is also working on November, an editorial project launched in 2020 featuring long-form interviews on art, media, politics, and architecture.