Tommy Kha
Photo Credit: Jay Amrahs
Tommy Kha (b. Memphis, TN) received his Photography MFA from Yale University.
His work has been published in Foam, Wall Street Journal, Southern Cultures, the New Yorker, Dazed, Interview, McSweeney’s, Pitchfork, Hyperallergic, and Miranda July’s “We Think Alone,” and Vice.
In 2023, Aperture published his first monograph Half, Full, Quarter, following his solo shows Má at Higher Pictures and Ghost Bites, curated by Dawn Chan, at Baxter St at CCNY. Má, an exhibition showing the ongoing, decade-long collaboration between the artist and his mother.
In addition, he has exhibited at Blue Sky Gallery, Yancey Richardson Gallery, and Shanghai’s Yongkang Lu Art, Nathalie Karg Gallery, Launch F18, Teen Party, and with Vasli-Souza at the Paris Photo’s Curiosa curated by Holly Roussel, and the Hyères Festival; group museum exhibitions include High Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Leslie-Lohman Museum, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and participated in the inaugural Tennessee Triennial at the Brooks Museum.
He is in the collections of SFMoMA, George Eastman House, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
He is a past recipient of the Hayes Prize, Next Step Award, Foam Talent, and NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Photography and a former resident at Pioneer Works, Lighthouse Works, Kinosaito, Light Work, and BAXTER ST (née Camera Club of New York).
He appeared in Laurie Simmons’ narrative feature, My Art, and has been featured in Art21’s Close-up series. .Currently, Kha studies kung fu under Sifu Ken Lo. He has taught at the New School and Rutgers, and a critic at Pratt Institute and Yale University, where he now teaches.
He joined Higher Pictures in 2022. His first major publication, Half, Full, Quarter was published by Aperture in February 2023. Most recently, his first museum solo show, Other Things Uttered, opened at the Addison Gallery of American Art in September.
He lives and works between New York City and Memphis. Kha is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow.
The Chain Letter Project (No. 2): A Collective Memory
During the COVID-19 pandemic, amid rising violence against Asian Americans, Tommy Kha envisioned photography as a means of building community and solidarity. He distributed disposable cameras to Asian American friends nationwide, asking them to document their daily lives in response to a series of prompts.
The resulting hundreds of photographs became The Chain Letter Project (No. 1), first exhibited at New York’s Baxter St Project Space in 2023. For his exhibition at the Addison, Kha has created a second iteration by collaborating with students and faculty from Phillips Academy, Andover High School (Andover, MA), Central Catholic High School (Lawrence, MA), and Middlesex Community College (Lowell, MA).
Among the list of prompts given to students are several written by the project’s original participants, forging new links in the collaborative chain. When installed together, these overlapping photographs form what Kha describes as “a collective memory.” Visitors were invited to submit their own photographs in response to the prompts, adding their own stories to this ever-expanding visual narrative.
