INTRODUCTION
Early in his career, Tommy Kha was told it was a liability to be so hard to categorize—was he primarily a queer artist? Asian American? Chinese-Vietnamese American? Southern? A portraitist? Though he is all of these, his photography resists narrow categories; so does Kha himself. A young Memphis native whose images have been featured in the New York Times, Vice, and The New Yorker, and collected in a 2023 book from Aperture, Half, Quarter, Full, Kha has also dabbled in filmmaking and improv comedy. He studies kung fu with an NYC-based grandmaster and commutes to teach photography classes at Yale (Kha now splits his time between New York and Memphis). “I like to have a lot of things that I want to experience in the world,” he says. This adventurous spirit also manifests in his surprising photographs, which upend traditional methods of portraiture to explore identity and community, often in the context of his ongoing relationship to a changing American South.
Growing up in Memphis, Kha saw the layered histories that inform the present-day South. Kha was born in 1988 to Chinese-Vietnamese refugees who had met in Canada and migrated to Tennessee, following other family members. His father left the family when Tommy and his older sister were very young, leaving their mother, May, to parent alone. The family lived in Whitehaven, in South Memphis, down the street from Elvis Presley’s Graceland, where tourists and costumed tribute artists convene year-round to honor “the King,” with an uptick in August for the annual Elvis Week extravaganza. Once an affluent white suburb, Whitehaven became a majority Black community, after integration and white flight beginning in the late sixties. Kha and his sister were the only Asian American children in the predominantly African American Graceland Elementary, though their difference did not stop them from making friends. Wary of Memphis’s dangers, many families limited letting kids roam, so Kha spent much of his childhood outside of school entertaining himself with reading, television, and imaginative play. Later, he enrolled in a middle school across the city with a strong arts program. As a teen, he got into photography and became involved in Memphis’s burgeoning independent film scene, where he landed his first job as a still photographer. He enrolled in the Memphis College of Art (closed in 2020) and continued exploring the city with his camera.
Yet despite Kha’s lifelong ties to Memphis, people have regularly mistaken him for a visitor, even in his neighborhood coffee shop. The Khas’ presence is visible evidence of diaspora; his ancestors fled China in the 1930s for Vietnam, a few generations before their descendants fled to North America. He describes their settling in Tennessee as somewhat happenstance; immigrants often go where they can. Being from Whitehaven, he learned at a young age that people often misinterpret appearances, sometimes disastrously. Recalling his childhood during a phone interview, he said that “[My classmates] had this other kind of experience in a way that their appearance in the world has always drawn suspicion. These are my friends. These are my neighbors. These are people I played with at recess. Even then, not knowing the specificity of the dangers of the world, I knew that they also had to navigate the outside and ways to not be perceived as a danger.” These experiences made Kha highly conscious of the dynamics of seeing and being seen, the invention and projection that can obscure another’s humanity, the masks we might adopt for safety or acceptance or other purposes.
As a young art student, his relationship to his home city became a formative question: “What does it mean to be a Southern photographer? Which meant, for me, to acknowledge a lot of spaces around me, not to say that I have authority or intimate knowledge. I’m just as much an insider, outsider, outsider-looking-in, or a tourist even as I’m someone who is from Memphis.” After graduation, Kha left Memphis for an MFA at Yale and began building a national reputation as an up-and-coming photographer. His project Lotuses Among Magnolias documents Asian American life in the South through scenes of everyday life and the spaces and artifacts that support it. Kha reveals another dimension of the Memphis iconically captured in the photographs of William Eggleston, an artistic “idol” and friend whose work once defined the region for many outsiders. At the time Kha first picked up a camera and into his college years, photography in the mode of Eggleston, Sally Mann, and William Christenberry predominated in Southern galleries, photography books, and museums, documenting Southern landscapes and culture in quiet but lush tableaux with carefully observed detail; Lotuses Among Magnolias engages with that tradition. The exuberantly colored interiors and exteriors of Memphis Chinese restaurants belong just as much to the genre of Americana as the Shelby Forest General Store that Kha also photographs and the diners that Eggleston memorialized.
Facades continues some of the themes of Lotuses, while showcasing the more experimental style for which Kha has become known, especially within the tradition of the self-portrait. Kha eschews Photoshop and uses physical props and costumes to create effects. Many of these works engage with displacement, often through playful use of cardboard cut-outs, jigsaw puzzles, and 3D-printed masks. Cardboard avatars of Kha appear headless, upside-down, along a roadside or in a schoolroom. His face appears on his friends’ bodies. Via temporary tattoos, his eyes are doubled on his face.
Some of Kha’s most evocative works in both series portray May, his mother, a person displaced in young adulthood and forced to invent a life in a foreign setting. Kha says that he sees his images of her as partial self-portraits, since as her child his origins are in her. “I am a cutout of my mother,” he has written. Tommy and May Kha often appear together, sometimes in slightly surreal domestic scenes involving costumes and props, sometimes in more contemplative and naturalistic poses. Collaborating for Tommy’s portraits over the years has been one way for them to better understand each other’s lives.
Kha often invites his portrait subjects to actively participate in image-making, even while he conceives and directs, sometimes inviting surprise and chance. In one project, people of various genders kiss him on the lips. In many images, May or other subjects can be seen holding the shutter-release cable, deciding for themselves what moment should be frozen. These images invite viewers into intimate spaces of Memphis’s queer and Asian American communities. Alongside the sometimes-campy staged moments, we see the evidence of domestic life: plastic hangers and a floral comforter on outdoor clotheslines, cracked shower tiles, a tissue box and skewed lampshade, a kitchen altar.
As an Asian American photographer documenting the South, Kha at times encountered pushback from artists and critics (usually outside the region and usually white) with stereotyped conceptions about what the South’s artistic or intellectual material is and to whom it belongs. One opined that Eggleston had already exhausted what there was to say about Memphis photographically; others took umbrage at Kha photographing another Memphis landmark, the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, believing that subject matter should be reserved for Black artists. Other challenges arose closer to home. During one painful episode, some Tennesseans vocally objected to an installation at the Memphis airport of a series of photos that featured Kha costumed as Elvis. The photos were briefly taken down, before an outpouring of support for Kha and his project led to them being reinstalled.
Resisting those efforts to limit his vision, Kha often emphasizes that people and places exist in a state of constant death and rebirth, adaptation and evolution. This is true not just of the city and state of his birth or in his personal life, but in his art. Kha constantly pushes himself to experiment and take new kinds of images. He shoots on all kinds of cameras, film and digital, from 35mms to disposables to photobooth strips. “I invite all photographic approaches,” he says. Kha has also become sought-after as an editorial photographer, creating polished and even glamorous packages for the New York Times, W Magazine, The New Yorker, and others. His ability to move between whimsical and solemn subject matter gives depth to his portfolio of commissions. He has also been continuing his Facades series in the Northeast, not feeling it had to be exclusive to Tennessee.
This body of work has resonated with a wide audience. Kha’s photography has been featured at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, Paris Photo, SFMoMA, and many other venues; he is currently preparing his first solo museum show at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts, after winning the Addison Artist’s Council’s Bartlett H. Hayes Jr. Prize. The Addison exhibition has been a welcome opportunity for Kha to explore his longstanding interest in installation and collage in new ways; it will open to the public in September 2025. In photography, installation, and life, Kha remains conscious of all he wants to explore. “I’m still at the beginning,” he says.
C. J. Bartunek
Images © 2024 Tommy Kha. Images appear courtesy of the artist.