By Hector R. Membreno-Canales, November 10, 2025
Over the past year, Brooklyn and Memphis artist Tommy Kha visited the Phillips Academy campus as an artist-in-residence, working closely with students, faculty, and the curatorial staff to produce his first solo museum exhibition, “Tommy Kha: Other Things Uttered” on view through January 25, 2026.
Kha bends photography into sculptural and material forms, a visual metaphor for the layered palimpsest of personal and collective identity. The exhibition begins outside the Addison Gallery, where two photographic facemasks of the artist are mounted on neoclassical busts in the façade’s niches. Inside, images expand to mural scale, wrap around corners, hang off-center, overlap, and appear as life-size paper cutouts, where the installation heighten the viewer’s awareness of both the image and its placement.
A long corridor gallery is lined with a frieze of over 50 wallet-sized landscape photographs from the artist’s home in the American South, a photographic motif often associated with his mentor and friend, William Eggleston. Yet Kha’s lens is distinctly his own: photographs of Chinese restaurants, dry cleaners, and nail salons that explore how place shapes identity. His series “Signs or Signages that Sign What They Sign, Not What We Want Them to Sign” documents Asian-owned businesses across the South, asking how does a picture of a place function as identity? In these communities, the idea of a “Southern accent” is both literal and metaphorical.
The main gallery of the exhibition has cutouts, photographs of cutouts, and photographs of photographs of cutouts. “Flatlands” (2025) is an assemblage of larger-than-life vanitas in the form of three-dimensional collage, made from photographs, foam core, cardboard, glue and paper. It features cutouts of everyday objects: fruits, vegetables, a dumpling steamer basket, and household shrines alongside photographs printed on fleece fabric, creating a strange domestic familiarity. It’s whimsical, playful, and humorous. Some objects in “Flatlands” are larger than life-scale, while other objects (like a trompe l'oeil box fan cut out) mischievously deceive at first into believing it’s the actual thing; the treachery of images.
The artist residency included direct engagement with the secondary school students: artist talks, visits to his on-campus studio, exhibition walk-throughs with museum educators, small-group discussions with the artist, and a collaborative photo assignment of Kha’s design. That project, “The Chain Letter Project” culminated in a large photo collage included in the exhibition of the student’s photographs who collectively used disposable cameras to respond to prompts such as “make a portrait without a person in it.”
The “Project”---first initiated at New York’s Baxter Street Project Space in 2023---began during the pandemic amid rising anti-Asian violence. In an academic context where so many students identify as people of color (where a half century ago, diversity meant hanging out with someone from the other dorm) the work speaks to an experience both familiar and rarely pictured, and reminds students, and perhaps all of us, that the act of looking can also be one of belonging.
Understanding Kha’s origin story is the cipher wheel decoding much of his work. Ethnically Chinese, like many during the Second World War, especially those in Southeast Asia, his family became part of a diaspora living outside mainland China. Kha’s grandparents resettled in Vietnam, where his grandfather worked as a dentist (more on this later). The Vietnam war created political instability, persecution, and economic collapse for many families--including Kha’s-- and large-scale refugee movements out of Vietnam in the late 1970s and 1980s. The family resettled yet again in Canada (where his parents met) before relocating to Memphis, making him a first-generation, Asian-American born in the US to Chinese-Vietnamese parents. All these hyphens have made Kha acutely aware of the plasticity of his identity.
The work is shaped by his experience as a queer-Asian-American-southerner. He’s described his early surroundings in Memphis as being marked by cultural and racial isolation, growing up in a single parent home, and having a complicated relationship with his mother who was unaccepting of his queer identity, while also withholding information about their family history.
Photography, however, became a vehicle for Kha and his mother, May Kha, to communicate, silently. He calls their collaborative works “half self-portraits” and contends, “I’m a cutout of my mother. We’re cut from the same cloth.” Kha contains multitudes, which is why collage, the constructed image, and self-portraiture are such rich motifs for him.
Kha weaves the visual dialogue between mother and son several times throughout the show, “Mine IX, Den(tist Room), Whitehaven, Memphis” (2017) is a photo that features May Kha sitting upright on a bright orange carpet in the corner of a room, her hands crossed over her knees, her skin speckled by the light from the window shade. She looks directly into the camera, stoically. This image is at once innocuous, and illusive. It features a dentist’s chair that belonged to Kha’s grandfather, who found it difficult to continue his dental practice when trying to afford both a home and medical office, and so would see patients in the family living room. This photo, like others, features a cut photo Kha’s head, face, or a fragment thereof, sometimes multiple times, popping out of unconventional places- like from under the dentist chair.
Kha’s process is unlike traditional self-portraiture. Early in his practice, to set focus and composition for self-portraits, he would place a cardboard cutout of Elvis before swapping himself in. Eventually, he decided that the cutout was the photograph. This led him to make portraits of himself as a cutout, refusing the directness or intimacy typically associated with the genre of self-portraiture.Creating these cardboard cutouts of his face and inserting them into the scene is very much like a self-portrait, but you see the edges. He doesn’t quite ‘fit in,’ just like he didn’t growing up. The result is a kind of contrived awkwardness, an exaggerated performance of the feeling of isolation.
“Constellations XVII, Pinky, Cooper-Young, Memphis” (2019) has the artist, framed from the back, a reclining odalisque, holding a paper cutout of his face like a paper fan. Upon closer inspection, however, is the realization that the figure holding the paper cutout, is itself, a cutout. A mirage.
Kha’s work reframes photography not as documentation of reality, but as a memory garden through which truth can be staged when our elders are unable to articulate their own truths. Through multilayered scenes, nesting images within images, or assembling sculptural photo-objects, Kha calls attention to the fallibility and flexibility of photographic meaning. He makes humorous photographs of photographed photographs. He’s interrogating not only who we see, but how photography itself mediates who is seen at all. By blurring the line between image and object, nostalgia and presence, Kha locates his work in the broader field of contemporary photography that prioritizes process, fluid narrative, and identity as something stitched together rather than discovered.
Tommy Kha’s work explores themes of home and family, collaboration (especially with his mother), place as portraiture, and dialogue and describes photography as a language and insists everyone speaks it with a photographic “accent.” His photos ask: who has been cut out of the Western canon? These questions resonate widely among students navigating their coming of age and identity formation, young artists and anyone trying to define the communities to which they belong.
Hector R. Membreno-Canales is an artist, educator, and researcher living and working in Massachusetts. He is the Francis C. Robertson Chair of the Art Department at Phillips Academy Andover and Lecturer in the Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) program at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.)
TOMMY KHA "Constellations XXIV Verplanck, New York" 2024 Courtesy of the artist and Higher Pictures.
TOMMY KHA "Headtown XII, Midtown Memphis" 2021 Courtesy of the artist and Higher Pictures.
TOMMY KHA "Mine IX, Den(tist Room) Whitehaven, Memphis" 2017 Courtesy of the artist and Higher Pictures.
TOMMY KHA Installation view Addison Gallery of American Art, 2025 Courtesy of the artist and Higher Pictures.
TOMMY KHA Installation view Addison Gallery of American Art, 2025 Courtesy of the artist and Higher Pictures.