Tommy Kha

I like to think of my individual projects as one large body of work. An anthology film through the framework of self-portraiture, the snapshot, humor, and performance art. I shift between humor and pathos, familiarity and foreignness, performer and camera operator, author and director, staged and straight photographies.

Spiritually, my work is a continuation of my mother’s photographs she created in 1984, a year after she fled Vietnam. The relationship between photography changes within two generations—my mother’s work depicting gatherings, celebration, and liberation, whereas my work is performative and semi-fictive through our collaborative photo-sessions.

I see my body as a limited space extending its narratives outside of it through familial relationships and identity politics. Thus, my work is a mapping of Asian Diaspora, which may be a possible space my queerness figures into against landscapes that are a result of trauma and violence from my mother’s generation.
Specifically, quarter- and half- self-portraits, or photographs of my grandparents and mother respectively are images of post-immigration experiences and the darker histories not pictured family album—the family album and my body are sites of conflicting narratives.

In Facades, “cut-up pictures” take the form of cardboard cutouts, jigsaw puzzles, paper masks, 3-D printed masks, temporary tattoos of my eyes, wallpaper, photo-backdrops, as well as my mother’s image. I am a cutout of my mother.

I do not use Photoshop in my work—most of my work is done in camera by using a combination of inserting fabricated props, available light, and documenting performances—allowing the artifice of the props and sets to show. The pictures are a result from play and experimentation. I allow myself control over my depiction while rephotographing my “photographic limbs.” The resulting picture straddles between still life, portrait, and self-portrait.

Positions of power are confused. I’m interested in restaging and unconsciously depicting how Otherness is represented photographically. I explore how Western media and art histories can play into how Othered bodies are perceived and imaged. While my photography attempts to filter through post-colonial, post-immigration, and post-heteronormative gazes, I work with a side glance that offers more slippage. It allows the images to take on different guises in telling its narrative.

In short, my work is about the self in self-portrait, the portrait in self-portrait, and the hyphen in self-portrait.