An Appeasing Conversation with Tommy Kha

Tommy Kha (special thanks to Jolene Lupo at the Penumbra Foundation)

Tommy Kha is a Chinese American photographer whose photos explore sexuality and the Asian diaspora. He currently lives and works between New York City and Memphis and received his Photography MFA from Yale University. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at galleries and museums, including at Launch F18 (NY), LMAKgallery (NY), PS122 Gallery (NY), Brooks Museum (TN), Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art (NY), Blue Sky (Portland), Ogden Museum of Southern Art (LA), Teen Party (NY), Aperture (NY), Yongkang Lu Art (Shanghai), Hyères Festival (France), and Kunstverein Wolfsburg (Germany). He is an Artadia New York 2020 finalist, CR Magazine’s Photography Annual 2019 winner, a Foam Talent 2019 shortlist, Hyères Photography Grand Prix 2019 Finalist, an En Foco Photography Fellowship recipient, and a former artist-in-residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Light Work, the Camera Club of New York, and Crosstown Arts. He is a recipient of the Next Step Award, Foam Talent, Creator Labs Photo’ Fund, and a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship finalist. He was named one of 47 artists in the inaugural Silver List. Tommy’s work has been published in FOAM, Creative Review, Dazed, Interview, McSweeney’s, Hyperallergic, Vice, Modern Painters, Slate, the Huffington Post, BUTT Magazine, Buzzfeed, and Miranda July’s “We Think Alone,” collaborated with the Billboard Creative in Los Angeles. He has appeared in Laurie Simmons’ narrative feature, My Art. His work was the cover of Vice Magazine’s 2017 Photography Issue. He currently teaches photography at the New School. His latest exhibit is a group exhibit Mother at the Mason Exhibitions in Arlington, VA. Tommy’s Art21 episode debuted, and he recently joined Higher Pictures Generation. He is currently working on his first major publication with Aperture in preparation for some solo shows at Vasli Souza and Baxter Street at the Camera Club of NY.

I had the pleasure of asking Tommy why photography is essential and how it displays his artistic statement, what is his favorite setting, and how he selects images to create a series.

UZOMAH: How do you select a series of photos to go together with the theme with the images sticking out as untraditional and artistic?

TOMMY:  It’s a bit tricky to answer because I’m not the best editor of my own pictures. I don’t think I look at my work in a linear or direct way as I switch between ongoing projects, though it feels like it’s coming from the space between routine and logic and improvisation. 

I think I’m more concerned about the picture and the construction, performance, or scene presented to the camera. 

I’m mostly trying to see what is possible with photographs that can be re-presented in different formats, and it’s that synthesis, the overlapped space in a Venn Diagram. 

But sometimes, I throw a broad of pictures in the air and use the ones that land face up.

Take (XVIII), Cordova, TN 2021

U: What do you prefer shooting with black and white or color? And why?

T: I really don’t think of it as a preference, photography is photography to me, I think it is all valid mostly because most people read specific images as photographs. Personally, and uninterestingly, I associate color photography with the Southern landscape. Mostly because of Eggleston and Christenberry. Though the first art photograph I saw in a museum in Memphis was a Sandy Skoglund picture.

U: What is your favorite setting, and why?

T:  I like the anonymity of the city, but I mostly lived near a body of water throughout my life—and not because I have a terrible sense of direction. I don't know if it's related; a quote from Agnès Varda's film, Uncle Yanco, articulates this sentiment. "It's important to always be by the sea. The sea is the element of love. The Greeks say so. Aphrodite emerged from the water." 

Sheepshead (II), Los Angeles, CA 2018

U: How has growing up both Asian and queer in the south been eye-opening to you and how others treat each other, especially gays and Asians? 

T:  I think there’s a constant back and forth between two spaces: I don’t think I inhabit the space where I’m conscious of those identities and experiences, but rather those unconscious decisions to protect our bodies or how we navigate within the world, continue to play out. 

My friend described me as an interloper, moving through and around communities comprised of these identities. It’s only in recent years that these crossovers are being described, and are allowed to be described (those intersections have always existed). I’ve always been curious about people, and coming from those communities are empathy, collaboration, and sharing space.

Constellations (XVIII), Whitehaven, Memphis, 2019

U: How did you come up with the name “Soft Murders”?

T: It comes from Susan Sontag. It felt related to a picture I was making of my mother because I’m a cutout of her and the acknowledgment of my aunt’s murder back in 1990s Tennessee.

“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”

Through this notion, the body of work comprises several smaller projects: the archive, the family album, appropriation, and cutouts, whether a self-portrait or not, I’m trying to gleam things of myself I otherwise cannot see.

U: What is one thing you would like to see the art world do in terms of how they deal with acquiring a position to create more representation for both Queer and Asian artists?

T:  I’m not sure I’m the best person to ask this, but I can try. I think the art world could have a bit more empathy than sympathy, to actually showing up, not just supporting, and more curiosity about people not at the table. 

Exchange-place (II and a Half), Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, 2017

U: Why is photography important in how it displays your artistic statement?

T: Recently, I have been describing photography being between language (because language is a communal activity) and more lately, as a form of chasing ghosts, possession, and exorcisms.

I think of Hippolyte Bayard, I remember reading photography, in the beginning, was described as a “discovery” rather than an “invention” because many of the components were coming from were found in nature though, this reasoning was used to not pay artists for their contributions.

There are these gestures, echoes, and bodies reflected in and through photographs, that continue to play outside and within picture making, and those things influence how we perform variations of our identity for the camera and to ourselves.

Stops (III), Oneonta, NY, 2020

U: How do you create a series from the photos you select?

T: My photographer friend, Hubert Crabières, says everything is essentially one ongoing project. I really modeled the structure of my work after the anthology film. I don’t really call my work series, preferring to call them a body of work, especially since I really do work with my body.

I have tried throwing prints in the air and creating a body of work on the pictures that landed face up. I think I like to be surprised by photography while adding to its canon, expanding the landscape for others, and finally, connecting to the past, but lastly, arriving at ourselves, and the art of that, the art that comes from that.

What is possible, what is care, what is a community, what is imaged. Cut, copy, paste.

U: What is next?

T:  More picture-making! I am working on my first major publication with Aperture and preparing for a few shows in the next year, including one at Baxter Street at the Camera Club of New York, Higher Pictures Generation, and Vasli Souza in Oslo, Norway, maybe not in that order chronologically.

For more information about Tommy’s artwork, please visit his site. Please also follow him on Instagram.