Photographer Tommy Kha’s first major monograph “Half, Full, Quarter” weaves together self-portraits and classically bucolic landscapes punctuated by the traces of East Asian stories embedded in the topography of the American South.
On the occasion of the book’s release, Kha discusses his unique approach to self-portraiture, his family lineage, and discovering his mother’s photographs for the first time in a wide-ranging conversation with photographer, video artist, and educator Ka-Man Tse.
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This event was recorded live on Thursday, February 16, 2023. Presented in collaboration with the Photography Program at Parsons School of Design at the New School.
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More about the book:
In this first major monograph, featuring almost a decade of work, Tommy Kha explores the highly personal psycho-geography of his hometown. As the artist states, “Memphis has become, for me, not only the place where I was raised but an active borderland between fantasy and memory, nostalgia and history, nonfiction and mythology.”
Memphis is where his mother, fleeing Vietnam in the early 1980s, settled, along with his extended family. Throughout the work, his mother emerges as a recurring character, sometimes the subject of quiet photographic study, and in others, a collaborative muse. “I’m a cut of my mom,” Kha asserts, “Every photograph I make of her is a Half Self-Portrait.” In snapshots drawn from a family album that serves as the one record of her journey to the United States, she is the source of nostalgia and barely captured memory.
In assembling a visual account of the struggle to find his own voice and narrate the fragmented history of his family, Kha challenges the cultural amnesia around Asian lives and experiences in recent American histories.
“Half, Full, Quarter” is the result of the Next Step Award, a partnership between Aperture and Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York, in collaboration with the 7|G Foundation.
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Tommy Kha (born in Memphis, 1988) lives and works between Brooklyn and Memphis. He received his MFA from Yale University in 2013, and is the recipient of the 2021 Aperture–Baxter St Next Step Award. Kha is represented by Higher Pictures Generation gallery, New York.
Ka-Man Tse is a photographer, video artist, and educator. She received an MFA from Yale University and a BA from Bard College, and has exhibited her work at the Lianzhou Foto Festival, Guangdong, China; Para Site and Lumenvisum, Hong Kong; the 2016 Hong Kong Contemporary Film Festival; and Videotage’s Both Sides Now III: Final Frontiers, in Hong Kong, Taipei, Shanghai, and the UK. She has taught at Cooper Union, City College of New York, and Yale School of Art, and is currently director of BFA photography at Parsons.
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