Tommy Kha’s Memphis

About this series: Memphis has played muse over the years to artists across the spectrum, from the music of Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Al Green, and the collective at Stax Records, to the prose of Peter Taylor, Shelby Foote, and John Grisham. Visual artists, too, have been inspired by Memphis, whose look has been described as gritty, dirty, active, eerie, beautiful, and captivating. “The Mind’s Eye” profiles the photographers whose work documents the city, including Bob Williams, Murray Riss, Saj Crone, Karen Pulfer Focht, Willy Bearden, Jamie Harmon, Brandon Dill, Ziggy Mack, Ernest Withers, Houston Cofield, and Andrea Morales.

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Tommy Kha is lying on the floor, looking up. I’m late to meet him, but he seems unperturbed. “They gave me the rotunda!” Kha exclaims.

The domed lobby of Memphis Brooks Museum of Art was once home to Nam June Paik’s Vide-O-belisk. Where that 20-foot tower of TVs stood, now there is a green blanket with Tommy Kha on it. He’s wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket and dark-blue jeans. A stray lock emerges from his studiously tousled hair, which he occasionally has to brush away from his eyes — like Clark Kent, by way of Elvis. We’ll get to his gaze later. I notice his brown leather boots are unzipped.

“I want people to lay down,” he says.

So I do. The green blanket (“It’s a dye sublimation on a fleece fabric,” Kha says) is textured like the grass of the nearby Overton Park Greensward, where, for 61 years, Memphis College of Art students lounged around between classes, seeking inspiration. Kha achieved his BFA from the now-defunct art school in 2011.

On the ceiling of the rotunda (above) is a giant eye, staring back at me. My “Wow!” echoes, sent back to me by the geometry of the dome. Kha turns and gives me the biggest smile I will see from him during this visit home — the rotunda’s acoustics are one of the reasons he wants you to experience this piece from the floor.

Upon closer inspection, Eye Is Another is fashioned from hundreds of individual photographs. “I wanted to activate the space as a photo mosaic, forming an eyeball from this accumulation of pictures I took over the years,” Kha says. “It’s modeled after my eye, but I made it blue, like Elvis’ eyes.”

The eye’s whites and blues come from pictures of puffy clouds in the sky that the photographer has been taking since 2014. Until recently, he never really knew what to do with them. “Some of these are from previous residencies I’ve had at Crosstown, or the Civil Arts project at the World Trade Center,” he says.

For someone whose art-world fame comes primarily from his controversial self-portraits, this David Hockney-like montage is unexpected. “Patty Daigle, one of the curators here, and I were talking about it since my Crosstown residency last year,” Kha says. “This is kind of like a — I hate that word now — ‘sampling’ of the directions I’ve been heading towards since lockdown and the pandemic, and things I’ve been interested in.”

“He’s not actually physically present in any of the photos that are on view, but I think his presence is still there,” says Daigle, the Brooks’ associate curator of modern and contemporary art, in a later phone interview. “He doesn’t really stick to one format, or to one type of photography. He embraces experimentation. I think he’s always pushing himself, pushing even the medium of photography.

“He’s just a really smart guy and he thinks really deeply,” she continues. “I know that sometimes doesn’t come off, because he also is so funny and kind of unassuming. He has a great sense of humor, but he also has a really critical mind. You don’t see that right off the bat, but I think if you spend some time with his work, you start to realize that he’s after something deeper.”

Eye Is Another invokes an oculus, the apex hole Roman architects included in their domes, most famously in The Pantheon. “It’s supposed to be the eye of God,” Kha says. “I like that it sort of looks judge-y.”

Several large-scale photos are mounted around the mezzanine level, including one exterior of Lotus, the legendary Vietnamese restaurant on Summer Avenue. “These are mostly from the book, but also thinking a lot about the Southern landscape,” he says, referring to Half, Full, Quarter, his first monograph, published this February by the prestigious photo-centric publisher Aperture.

Tommy Kha is having a banner year. His art can currently be seen in group exhibitions at Kingston, New York’s Center of Photography at Woodstock; the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, Florida; and as part of the 20th anniversary exhibition of New Orleans’ Ogden Museum of Southern Art. “The Ogden was the first museum that took me seriously,” Kha says.

In New York City, where Kha has lived for the better part of a decade after earning his MFA, he’s in Queer Love: Affection and Romance in Contemporary Art at The Bronx’s Lehman College Art Gallery and the East Village’s La MaMa Galleria. The week after I found him lying on the floor of the Brooks, he opened his solo show Ghost Bites at the Camera Club of New York with a book launch party for Half, Full, Quarter.

Beside the faux grass on the rotunda floor is another dye sublimation crowded with images of food and Chinese newsprint. This was all done in-camera, says Kha. “I don’t Photoshop — I don’t have time to Photoshop!” he laughs. “I’m just thinking about pictures. This was the first thing I did. I was initially thinking of community and thinking how my family would often gather — and we still do this — we would put down newspapers and put down a hot plate in the middle.”

It’s an image that resonates with Daigle. “Being an Asian-American woman growing up in the South, it’s this idea that you might be presenting different selves to different people. Depending on who you’re interacting with, there can be multiple senses of self that you present to others — and I don’t think this is a singular experience for Asian Americans.”

Eye Is Another is part of the inaugural Tennessee Triennial for Contemporary Art, a new series which Daigle says is “meant to show the country — and even the world — all of the contemporary art that’s going on in our state.”

“The theme for the Tennessee Triennial is repair,” says Kha. “I was thinking of pulling together these different aspects of my work into something fun for myself. I could do these straightforward photographs of my relationships to the American South in ways that also reflect some experiences for people. This South, the land itself, is so charged with histories of destruction and creation.”

When Memphis magazine editor-in-chief Anna Traverse Fogle first proposed Tommy Kha for our annual Mind’s Eye feature, a series showcasing the life and work of our city’s best-known photographers, I volunteered to do the story. Kha and I have been friends since we met in the Memphis film scene, so I texted him the good news.

“Ooooh, well I kinda feel I should bow out as I think there are other folks way more interesting than I am!”

But Fogle was determined that Kha was the right choice, so I ambushed him with a phone call. He’s a genuine star in the art world now, and is being pulled in a thousand directions. He agreed to do the story on the condition that it would not be just about him, but also the Memphis community that made him. “We’ll do something different, I promise,” I told him.

I’m not sure he believed me.

It’s Friday, January 27, 2023. Afternoon light streams through the windows of artist Rahn Marion’s studio inside First Congregational Church. Tommy Kha is here to see Marion’s new work, and I’m tagging along. Arms crossed, Kha stands in front of a group of wood carvings on a paint-splattered shelf. “Do you imagine them side by side, like a wall full of them?” he asks. “Or on pedestals, like individually?”

Marion points out one intricately carved pylon with a rather sad face. “This one is part of a bigger piece that I had for TONE [the local Black arts and culture nonprofit]. It was right out of quarantine and I had a solo show there. She’s usually wrapped up like the Virgin Mary.”

What begins as a quick jaunt to see the massive backdrops Marion paints for the church’s sanctuary turns into an impromptu tour of First Congo, as it’s affectionately known in Cooper-Young. We make a point of going to the basement. At the bottom of a red staircase is a door with a sign that reads Theatre South.

“Remember when I was the bouncer here?” says Kha.

This hundred-seat theater was once the MeDiA Co-Op, a hub of the raucous Memphis independent film scene of the aughts.

“It was actually the Memphis Digital Art Cooperative,” says filmmaker Morgan Jon Fox, one of the organization’s co-founders. “It was a group of ragtag, mostly at the time activist-oriented DIY filmmakers who got space in the basement of a church to start a co-op. Some of it was born out of what was previously the DeCleyre Cooperative, which kind of paved the way for the concept of co-ops in Memphis.”

Artist and journalist Eileen Townsend remembers the scene. “It went through several incarnations, but at the time, 2002 to 2005, it was a radical anarchist house that had a lot of early 20-something activists living there,” she says. “The name comes from a famous anarchist, [Voltairine] de Cleyre. It was also attracting a fringe of art kids, who later lived there.”

“‘Live’ is a very loose word,” says Kha. “I was couch surfing. That’s a nice phrase to say I was squatting there.”

Anarchist energy collided with emerging technology at the MeDiA Co-Op. They saw the promise in the combination of increasingly powerful desktop computers and affordable digital video cameras. “Our activist-minded, co-op brain, was like, ‘Yeah! This medium is now democratized! We can share this information! Everyone should have access to it,” says Fox. “There were people who were able to access the tools of filmmaking, when there was no other way in their lives that they could have ever done it. That’s what the digital revolution was all about.”

Kha was one of the diverse group of regulars at the weekly filmmaking workshops. “What I remember so distinctly when he first started coming was that his mom would bring him and sleep in her car during the workshop,” says Fox. “We all wished we had that kind of support — whether she understood at the time what he was after or not.”

At the MeDiA Co-Op, one minute you’d be editing an experimental video, the next you’d be called to act in someone’s feature film. “I got murdered a lot in horror movies,” remembers Kha.

“He was always making photos, from the time we were very young,” says Townsend. “He was an extremely quiet kid. Very shy, but always showing up and making photos about what the Memphis scene was like as a teenager.”

One of Kha’s earliest subjects was musician Valerie June, who played regularly in Cooper-Young. “I think Tommy was 15 when we first met, and I was probably 20,” she says. “We met in the coffee houses in Memphis, like Java Cabana, and we’ve been best friends ever since. My first impression was that he was very, very bright and super smart, like a genius wizard. He was passionate about his art and his craft. I knew he would be famous one day.”

We return to Marion’s studio, where he shows us another painting, this one based on a tarot card. The Tower depicts a lightning bolt striking a castle, as a crown and two figures fall from the burning windows. “Everything’s falling apart, and it’s in chaos,” Marion says. “But it can also mean rebirth and regrowth. Something failed, so something else has to happen.”

Sounds of stomping feet, followed by chanting, come from upstairs. “That’s Decarcerate Memphis,” says Marion. “They’re training for the protest tonight.”

Our conversation turns serious. In a few hours, the videos of Tyre Nichols’ murder at the hands of Memphis police will be released. Nichols was an aspiring photographer. He was returning to his mother’s home after capturing the sunset, like the shots that make up the dark center of Kha’s Eye Is Another.

As Tommy and I leave First Congo, we run into activist Amber Sherman in the parking lot. The community organizer is in a hurry, trying to have multiple conversations at once. She is followed by a documentary cameraperson. I think about the anti-gay-conversion therapy protests of 2005, which were captured by MeDiA Co-Op cameras for Fox’s documentary This Is What Love In Action Looks Like.

That night, Sherman would lead hundreds of people who marched onto the I-55 bridge, risking their lives in search of a better Memphis. Their demands to speak with the mayor went unanswered.

Tommy was always around with his camera, taking shots of what was going on in the films,” says Maritza Dávila.“I met him through my husband [Jon Sparks] and daughter [Jackie] because they were acting in independent films here in Memphis.”

Dávila is a printmaker who taught at Memphis College of Art until it closed in 2020. “Tommy looked older, and you know, now he is always young looking. But he looked so mature back then, when he told me he was planning on going to MCA. I felt, of course you should apply! It was love at first sight. He’s such a gentle person, and such a creative person, so thoughtful and purposeful.”

Kha flourished at MCA. The school’s photography program was designed by Haley Morris-Cafiero, whose book Wait Watchers documented people’s cruel public reactions to her appearance. The people in these street images didn’t know they were being photographed while they were mocking the photographer, and sometimes Morris-Cafiero would share a knowing look with the camera.

This idea of a photograph as a secret message from the artist to the audience would have a profound effect on Kha. Once a more traditional street photographer, he began to carefully stage his images. He dressed in costumes for self-portraits. He made a mask of his own face and inserted it in strange situations. His mother became a frequent subject. He initiated Return to Sender, a series of images depicting men kissing him while he kept an eye open, addressing the camera. Sometimes he looks at the viewer the way people looked at him when he was a young, misfit Asian guy in Memphis.

“It’s personal, and because of his experiences, it reaches many people at different levels,” says Dávila. “He’s a storyteller. He thinks about every element within his photography. He has a poise that he takes when he is part of the subject matter. It’s his attitude, and how the other characters act towards him. The way he looks at you — because he looks at the viewer — is very telling. He’s asking you to think.”

When Kha was nearing the end of his undergraduate work at MCA, he applied to Yale for graduate school. “No one told me to,” he recalls. “I just followed the instructions on the application and prayed.” He was accepted to the Ivy League school. Dávila says Kha is one of MCA’s greatest success stories.

After earning his MFA at Yale, Kha moved to New York City, where he joined the ranks of the restless strivers who give the metropolis its manic energy. “He’s been grinding it out in New York for a long time,” says Townsend. “Yale is something that helps you, for sure, but it doesn’t mean that you’re immediately an art star. You move to the city. You don’t have a studio. You’re working very hard on other people’s shoots. It takes a lot of resilience to continue to believe in your work and just keep showing up every day — especially when you see some of your classmates having immediate, stratospheric success. But Tommy is incredibly persistent. He’s always been that way.”

On another recent day, I’m sitting with Kha at a table in the middle of Crazy Noodle. It’s one of his favorite Memphis restaurants.

“Do you want to talk about the airport?” I ask.

This is the moment he’s been dreading. “Not really,” Kha says. “I guess, if that’s what people want to hear about …”

Kha grew up close to Graceland, and the cult surrounding Elvis has remained a source of fascination for him — especially the tribute artists, whom he returned to Memphis to photograph every year. “The way he photographed the Elvis impersonators, it’s still portraiture, but it feels like it’s a universe of its own, and it’s so uniquely his,” says Fox. “I think it’s truly beautiful”

In 2020, that tradition was interrupted by the pandemic. Kha says riding out the calamity in his tiny New York apartment was a trying, and paranoia-inducing, experience. “Do I risk my life to get on the subway and go to work?”

Work has always been Kha’s solace. Before the pandemic, he was getting used to rejection from galleries. “One was like, ‘You should either stick with making work about being Asian or being gay, but you can’t be both. We can’t sell that.’ Well, I’m not a salesman. It’s not what I do.”

By early 2022, his work was getting noticed on larger stages. He had landed a coveted residency at the World Trade Center.

Meanwhile, the Memphis Shelby County Airport Authority was completing a $245 million renovation. The new Concourse B was designed to greet visitors with more than 60 pieces of contemporary art by local artists in an exhibit coordinated by the UrbanArt Commission. In Kha’s telling, he was initially reluctant to take part. The images he submitted from the Return to Sender series were rejected. “I assume because of the same-sex kissing,” he says.

Ironically, the image he chose as a “safer” replacement would become the most controversial of his career. Constellations VIII depicts Kha in a blue kitchen — or rather, a cardboard cutout of him, dressed in one of Elvis’ distinctive, late-career jumpsuits, his gaze directed outward, toward the viewer. “I think it’s a beautiful, tender image,” says artist Joel Parsons, an art professor at Rhodes College, where he also directs the Clough-Hanson Gallery. “It’s lovely, it’s vibrant, and there’s a complexity to it. I feel ambivalence in it. I feel different emotions, and that’s what makes it great art. That’s also what makes it difficult to put into a public context, because most people don’t appreciate mixed feelings, the way artists do.”

Soon after Concourse B’s January 2022, grand opening, an Elvis fan named Jon Daly posted his picture of Constellations VIII hanging in the airport on Facebook. “The city of Memphis has forgotten Elvis fans,” he wrote. “What a joke.”

Soon, the Airport Authority was being bombarded with angry messages.

“What does this represent?” “What is it advertising?”

“Who is that supposed to be in the jumpsuit?”

Eileen Townsend covered the controversy for the Memphis Flyer in a March 2022 cover story. “Basically, they couldn’t see an Asian guy in an Elvis suit without thinking that it was a joke,” she says. “There’s a lot of baked-in racism in the way we look at images, and that was present in the whole discourse around that image.”

An emergency Zoom call was convened. “The first thing I said to UrbanArt and the airport people was an immediate apology,” Kha recalls. “I’m so sorry that this Facebook rumbling is causing this distraction from the show at the airport. We wanted it to be a space for all the artists that have paved the way and are still living in Memphis. I just felt so guilty that it shifted the whole show, and that’s what was everyone was talking about, when there’s all these other, great, amazing artists.”

The call ended in acrimony, and Airport Authority CEO Scott Brockman made the decision to take down the artwork. Word spread through Kha’s social network, and from there spilled over to national and international news outlets. “I thought I was proud of the way the city had grown,” says Valerie June. “People from me to Craig Brewer to [journalist] John Hubbell, everyone was on text with each other and calling and talking about it, in the sense of, ‘Oh my god, this is not who we are.’”

“Their official reasons — what they said was — they read it as a parody, or that he was mocking Elvis in some way,” observes Dávila. “But I don’t think those reasons were well thought through. I think they were just racist, frankly, considering we have Elvis impersonators from every single culture. Elvis does not belong just to a group of people. He’s an icon to the world.”

The backlash the Airport Authority received for removing the art was exponentially larger than the outcry which had led to its removal. Brockman reversed course and Constellations VIII returned to the walls three days after it was expelled. Now, the place where it hangs is a popular selfie spot for art-loving travelers.

“I think it shows the power of art to create great change in a world of heaviness and darkness,” says Valerie June. “People think that art is light, like this dream that’s soft and fluffy. But if you look at the dream of Dr. King, it was a beautiful idea, but it wasn’t something you can really hold. It’s something that we’re still fighting for, its completion, the beauty of it. Art is a lot like that. You can’t really hold all that it makes you feel. When people saw that piece, they felt a movement, and they felt some change. Some people were against that movement, that change. It’s the power of art to create this space. It doesn’t have to use words, it doesn’t have to give speeches, it doesn’t have to get involved in politics, but it is making great change in the world.”

After the airport affair, Tommy Kha was suddenly everywhere. “I never made that much in sales before last year, or had much luck talking to museums,” he says.

Joel Parsons was the only artist on the board of the UrbanArt Commission during the kerfuffle. “I was disappointed by the reaction, but not shocked, because I know how art gets treated when it goes out into the public realm,” he says. “We came up with this idea of doing an exhibition that might give us a chance to contextualize the work. There’s so much of what happened in that situation which felt like misunderstanding and ignorance. And we felt — I felt — like Tommy was owed a chance for people to really dig into his practice, to really see what it was about outside of the noise and all of the … misguided, I’ll say, conversations around the airport work.”

When Parsons broached the subject, “The first thing [Tommy] said was, ‘Let’s do a group show. Let’s bring other people in this conversation.’ He was very generous, knowing that he’s got the spotlight right now, he’s got a lot of energy coming his way, and he wanted to turn around and spread that to other people, right from the beginning. I think that’s a beautiful indication of the art world that he’s making, and how he thinks about the community around him.”

The Ecstasy of Influence: Mid-South Artists Centering the Margins opened at the Rhodes College Clough-Hanson Gallery on January 20th and runs through March 10th. It includes Kha’s kissing portrait that was originally rejected from the airport show, print work from Kha’s early mentor, Maritza Dávila, photographer D’Angelo Lovell Williams, and multimedia artists Ahmad George and Richard Lou.

“We knew that there were connections between them, but we realized collectively that those connections were deeper,” says Parsons. “I didn’t know that Tommy was an old family friend of Maritza, or that Ahmad George was a student of hers. They had never shown their work together in the same show. We kept unpacking all these connections. It was like, a six degrees of Tommy Kha kind of situation.

“Tommy didn’t invent this kind of work in Memphis,” Parsons continues. “He’s standing on the shoulders of some really amazing artists, and there are also people coming along behind him.”

By the first week of February 2023, Tommy Kha is back in New York City, preparing for his solo show and the release of Half, Full, Quarter, which critic Tony Wilkes has called a “haunting portrait of America’s Asian diaspora.”

When I call Kha to work out the final details of this story, he sounds exhausted, and a little overwhelmed by all the hoopla.

I tell him, “I think I have a title for the story.”

“What is it?”

“Tommy Kha’s Memphis.”

There’s a pause. “Oh no,” Kha whispers. “That’s too much.”