Tommy Kha’s Self-Inventions in Graceland

Last February, “Constellations (VIII)” was mounted as part of a public group installation at the Memphis International Airport. Then the owner of an Elvis tourism store shared the image on social media, disparaging it as a “joke,” and prompting a slew of complaints from self-appointed arbiters of Elvis’s legacy, many of them overtly racist. (“The Chinese bought the airport too?” one person said.) The airport caved under the negative attention and removed the work, then quickly reinstated it thanks to an opposing outcry. But the incident illustrated a Catch-22 for Kha as an Asian American artist engaging with an icon of Americana, no matter the notes of irony and melancholia in his self-depiction. Who gets to play with Elvis’s image? Even in the realm of sequinned fantasy, segregation and exclusion are enforced.

Kha’s subject matter is more directly autobiographical in the ongoing collaborative series “Má,” which he began a decade ago with his mother, May, who still lives in Memphis. (The title is a Vietnamese term for “mom.”) Through the simply staged but lush and nuanced vignettes, Kha elaborates a formidable and complicated connection between mother and son. At the Dumbo gallery Higher Pictures Generation, an exhibition of six of these images, made between 2015 and 2021, shows that the pair has found a winning balance between deadpan absurdism and formal acuity.