Object number2024.6.3
May (Madonna and Child in Four Acts, III), East Memphis
Date2021
Artist
Tommy Kha
(American, born 1988)
CultureAmerican
MediumPigment print
EditionEdition 4 of 5, plus 5 artist's proofs
DimensionsSheet: 45 x 36 in. (114.3 x 91.4 cm)
Credit LinePurchase, Advisory Council for Photography
On View
Not on viewPeriod21st c
Classification(s)
Vassar Exhibitions
Label TextWorking between Memphis and Brooklyn, Tommy Kha maps the fractured terrain of identity across generational and geographic divides. A first-generation Chinese American whose family fled China for Vietnam and later escaped after the fall of Saigon, he navigates multiple layers of displacement. For over a decade, he has collaborated with his mother in an ongoing series of domestic tableaux, depicting their relationship through photography after periods of estrangement. These collaborative portraits emerged as a way to rebuild connection across cultural and emotional distance. His mother, who fled Vietnam in the 1980s and had kept her own photographs from that period hidden for years, gradually became an active participant in the process. The images operate through careful choreography of intimacy and removal. In Kha’s photograph, lens flare illuminates the center while his mother sits with her camera, wearing a conical hat. Behind the clothesline, Kha emerges above the patterned quilt. The domestic setting becomes a stage for negotiating inheritance, memory, and the space between generations shaped by migration and loss.
Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge.
To help improve this record, please email
loebcollections@vassar.edu
Vito Acconci
2001
Culture: American
