Tommy Kha’s mother is a recurring subject in his photography, but he didn’t realize until five years into their collaboration that she was an image maker herself. In 2016, she gifted Kha with a photo album of photos she took when she arrived in Canada from Vietnam in the 1980s, before eventually settling in Memphis, where Kha was born. In his first monograph, Half, full, quarter (opening) and accompanying personal exhibition— “Ghost Bites,” on Baxter St at the Camera Club in New York through March 22 — Kha’s portraits, still lifes and layered landscapes coexist with his mother’s own photographs. The collaborative world between mother and son expands.
MY MOTHER’S IMMIGRATION EXPERIENCES and my own upbringing are so different, and the way we deal with the camera is so different. My mother’s work was born out of a celebration and extension of survival. Her photographs are the kind of things that most people have in their family archives, images of birthdays and meetings that are markers of their existence. They have come this far and it deserves to be commemorated and commemorated.
Nevertheless, by collecting our photos in Half, full, quarter, I realized that the things my mother photographed, even in fortuitous snapshots, also appeared in my work: masked faces in self-portraits, flowers, bodies of water, amusing facial expressions. We are also still haunted by our family history and generational trauma. The past echoes in the present. Maybe the poltergeist, this disturbance in the room, is how much my mom and I want to stand out and form our own identities. We are not just a mother and a child, but two people who are interconnected because of things like war, displacement and citizenship – things my mother refuses to talk about.
I cannot trace my family history beyond the 1930s. It is even difficult to get information about Grandma’s age and why we left China for Vietnam. My family stayed after Saigon fell, which I only found out later when filling in the blanks on why my grandmother had blackouts. It was PTSD. I saw it with my mother and aunts in how they never dealt with the trauma of events like a window exploding in front of them in the kitchen. I don’t have all the pieces, and there are some things I can’t even put into words.
I described photography as a means of arriving at my own representation, which is that of fragmentation. How much of my identity is my home? In 2019 I started photographing the interiors and exteriors of Chinese restaurants in the Mississippi Delta and the Memphis area, not only because my family is in Memphis, but because these are the remaining spaces of what was once a huge population that I had never heard of. . Growing up, I didn’t see another Asian person who wasn’t related to me for a very long time. How do these spaces retain their culture and origin? These images show what remains and are links to the past. I choose to map, archive and tell stories.
And how much of my identity is my mother? What is my own production? One of my first “puzzle portraits” is that of my mother and me. I took two photos about a year apart and lined up the compositions so I could swap out some of the puzzle pieces where our bodies met. I was like, “Oh my God, I look like my mom.” And I started laughing, but then I realized, “Oh shit, I have my mom’s laugh too.”
I wanted to represent and honor the matriarchy of the women who raised me – my grandmother, my mother, my aunts and my sister. The first track of “Ghost Bites”, on your immediate right as you enter, was supposed to be by my grandmother. She is losing her sense of herself due to dementia, and I wanted to portray her as my new subject and collaborator. Due to the size and configuration of the exhibition space, we had to move the work in the middle, which both derailed and reinforced the thinking behind the exhibition. Now the exhibition begins and ends with my mother. It’s sort of my mother’s immigration experience as told by a child of immigrants.
There’s a line of little pictures of shrines across the walls that are like vanity to represent my late aunt. I plan to do a project about his murder, but I also wanted to pay tribute to him now. There are two photographs in the book that are very quiet, and these are the first photos I took of his last known address from his autopsy report.
I don’t explicitly mention the murder of my aunt, but it is related to what is happening in this country. I was taking these photos and I was thinking about Half, full, quarter when the Atlanta spa shooting happened, when Michelle Go was pushed past an oncoming subway car, and when Christina Yuna Lee was killed in her home. It’s not in the monograph, but there is a secret photo album in the photo gallery I made while visiting Christina’s Memorial Shrine in New York’s Chinatown every Sunday. I wanted those images to be there, but I didn’t want to hang them up – it’s not my place, and it didn’t feel right.
It looked so much like how my aunt was killed. Although the circumstances are a bit different, it comes from the same place as those anti-AAPI sentiments. I can’t believe these things are still happening. It’s the kind of violence that I don’t particularly want to represent explicitly when I think of haunting. But it is present.
– As said to harley wong
