I profiled Tommy Kha’s Facades series for Foam Magazine’s 2021 TALENTS issue. An excerpt:

Identifying too-precise narratives in Kha’s work would, I think, deny their essence, which is one of refusal: refusal to play a simple representative game in which coherence and digestibility are rewarded. In images that look like family portraits and casual snapshots, Kha seems to be gesturing at queer experiences within Asian-American communities; he grew up in the American South, a region whose diverse Asian immigrant populations defy stereotypes both about its own ethnic and social composition and about East Asian immigrants as a universally prosperous and well-integrated ‘model minority,’ a destructive myth that is both anti-Black and also ignores the struggles and experiences of many first-generation immigrants and post-immigration experiences. Jose Esteban Munoz named as “disidentification” the process by which racialized people, especially queers, negotiate majority culture by transforming it towards their own ends. Kha disidentifies with the dominant photographic gaze, transforming the picture plane and denying perspective; and in so doing, manipulates not just his images but the genre itself.

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^{Photograph: Tommy Kha: Reunification (I), Millington, TN/Brooklyn, NY, 2020}