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Now You See Me is a group exhibition that brings together six artists—Jerry Takigawa, Priya Kambli, Tommy Kha, Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Leonard Suryajaya, and Tomiko Jones—who offer a glimpse into the vast complexity and nuance of Asian America. While diverse in scope, works in the show share a common thread: an urge to be seen and recognized through personal narratives put forth on one’s own terms—all set against the backdrop of a country that didn’t coin the phrase ‘Asian American’ until 1968, and a country that continues to overlook Asian Americans in the public sphere.
For Jerry Takigawa and Priya Kambli, inherited photographs become artifacts that connect the artists with past family traumas worth remembering for the lessons they hold. For Tommy Kha, Jennifer Ling Datchuk, and Leonard Suryajaya, staged tableaus brimming with material objects—be they cardboard cutouts of Kha’s face, Datchuk’s irreverent blue-and-white porcelain pieces, or Suryajaya’s indulgent excesses of colorful fabrics and household items—call on the dynamic intersections of contemporary Asian America with aspects of sexuality, gender, cross-cultural understanding, and belonging. In turn, Tomiko Jones’ photographed performance of a Japanese memorial ritual for her father circles back to tradition, lending a quiet vulnerability to the fray.
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Jerry Takigawa
Balancing CulturesWith an eye toward recent history and its direct impact on the present day, Jerry Takigawa and his series Balancing Cultures delve into the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. In 1942, President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 authorized the establishment of military zones in the United States, leading to the incarceration of Japanese Americans, German Americans, and Italian Americans in concentration camps. For Takigawa’s immigrant grandparents and American-born parents, this government-sanctioned condemnation of their community read as a stark rejection from the country they called home.
In Balancing Cultures, Takigawa engages with this personal family narrative, building and photographing temporary collages assembled from his relatives’ collection of photographs, papers, and war memorabilia from their imprisonment. Layering family artifacts and historical documentation atop blurred, black and white family portraits, Takigawa’s works underscore the contradictions in his family’s existence: wanting to embrace their Japanese heritage while being made to feel ashamed of it through institutional means. While the internment of Japanese Americans ended in March of 1946, the exclusionary ideologies behind it remain at play today for so many—rendering Takigawa’s reach into the past as timely as ever.
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Priya Kambli
Buttons for EyesIn her series Buttons for Eyes, Priya Kambli presents photographs that revolve around her family narratives, predicated upon her mother’s ever-playful question: “Do you have eyes or buttons for eyes?” While the humor in this query insinuates the receiver’s inability to see an object right in front of their face, it also demonstrates a deeper, expansive concern: that we, as a society, tend to not always be aware of what is happening around us.
In response, Kambli’s offering is simple: look at the world “in more unusual ways.” To this end, the artist broaches large-scale issues of migration, visibility, and cross-cultural understanding through the intimacy of old family photographs. These family relics are adorned with playful interventions—swaths of colored light, delicate geometries of powdered pigment—and then rephotographed. The elusive faces of Kambli’s loved ones appear and reappear, underscoring the artist’s sense of loss for a past that no longer exists, and for a future that will usher in its own set of losses. Despite the heaviness in sentiment, the approach in Buttons for Eyes is still a joyful one—one that “winks, pokes and inverts” the personal histories that it mythologizes.
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Tommy Kha
Tommy Kha’s imagery employs a whimsical and humorous attitude as it foregrounds the complex angles and intersections of the artist’s identity: Asian American, queer, and raised in the American South. Using various cardboard cutouts and masks bearing the likeness of his face, Kha magically creates self-portraits without ever turning the camera on himself. Instead, his face facades are placed and photographed everywhere else: joined to an Elvis cutout, lurking behind curtains as his mother looks on, plastered to classical era busts, serving as the head atop friends’ idealized bodies.
While Kha’s light-filled and colorful environments may change, his face cutouts typically do not waver from their stoic, deadpan expressions. The ubiquity of the artist’s face turns his likeness into a kind of visual motif, leaving viewers to search for and rely on it as an anchor point tying one work to the next. In this clever and absurd way, Kha ensures that he is distinctly visible in a manner that only he controls—a privilege that is usually not afforded to those at the crossroads of his communities.
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Jennifer Ling Datchuk
A multimedia artist working with everything from ceramics to embroidery to photography, Jennifer Ling Datchuk examines elements of and interactions among femininity, fragility, and identity. Born to a Chinese immigrant mother and a father descended from Russian and Irish immigrants, the artist unpacks the in-between spaces found in being neither fully Chinese nor white. These tensions manifest themselves through Datchuk’s unexpected and quotidian uses of porcelain, which pay homage to, yet also subvert, the legacy, tradition, and poise attributed to Chinese ceramics.
In some images, Datchuk can be seen wearing porcelain eyebrows of her own design, an act which effectively turns body hair—an entity which women are socialized to routinely pluck, shape, and/or process—into an ironically precious object. In other images, the artist presents viewers with fist-sized porcelain rings worn on hands decorated with matching, manicured nails, marrying the classic blue and white aesthetic of Chinese porcelain with an affect steeped in American bravado and consumerism. With storied materials, Datchuk and her pieces spark discussions on globalized politics, cultural cross-pollination, and the commodification and gendering of beautiful things.
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Leonard Suryajaya
There is a dizzying comfort to be found in the domain of Leonard Suryajaya’s spectacular, orchestrated chaos. Creating from an acute familiarity with transience and otherness—Suryajaya is a queer, Chinese-Indonesian immigrant who grew up attending Christian schools in majority-Muslim Indonesia—the artist crafts theatrical scenes filled with clashing patterns, textures, and colors. His photographs are often communal undertakings, featuring his family, friends, and partner as collaborative subjects.
Viewers, too, are invited into these messy moments. While some may find themselves lost in the abundance, there are recognizable sights embedded into the works that resonate all the same: the universal branding of Calvin Klein underwear, plastic flowers and fruits, the soft gesture of a woman’s hand resting atop a younger woman’s sleeping head. These competing—yet also somehow harmonious—aggregations of material objects and human figures reflect back on how the incongruous ways in which we chose to blend in and stand out are constantly in flux. Through this lens, Suryajaya reminds us that our everyday interactions with intimacy, authority, and materiality are inextricably bound to broader questions of citizenship and belonging in an ever-changing, transnational world.
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Tomiko Jones
HatsubonA photographic memorial for Tomiko Jones’ father, Hatsubon hovers in the colliding spaces of ritual and performance. The series is named for a ceremony that marks the first anniversary of a loved one’s death, held as part of O-bon, an annual Japanese Buddhist tradition for honoring one’s ancestors. Associated with O-bon is the sending of the shoryobune, a small vessel meant to guide the spirits of the deceased. It is this act that runs as an undercurrent to Hatsubon: to commemorate her father during O-bon, Jones constructed her own boat from bamboo and waxed kozo paper, sending it to sea at dawn from the shores of Hawai’i, in the company of her mother and sister.
Photographs from those ephemeral moments materialize as vast, black and white landscapes, some printed on floating sheets of silk and some on paper. Other photographs position Jones’ father’s urn afloat in bodies of water significant to the family, including the Monongahela River in her father’s birthplace of Pennsylvania. Figures that appear are silhouetted, blurred, or on the periphery, suggesting a kind of knowing surrender to the land and to the water—one that can only be born out of having a deep, longstanding connection with both from the very beginning. In this way, Hatsubon gives breathing room to tradition in contemporary life.
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Jerry Takigawa is an independent photographer, designer, and writer. He is a co-founder and creative force behind the Center for Photographic Art’s PIE Labs. He received the Imogen Cunningham Award in 1982, the Clarence J. Laughlin Award in 2017, and CENTER’s Curator’s Choice Award in 2018. His work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, and the Monterey Museum of Art. He studied photography with Don Worth at San Francisco State University and received a degree in art with an emphasis in painting. Takigawa lives and works in Carmel Valley, California.
Priya Kambli was born in India. She moved to the United States at age 18 carrying her entire life in one suitcase that weighed about 20 lbs. She began her artistic career in the States and her work has always been informed by this experience as a migrant. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette and continued on to receive a Masters degree in Photography from the University of Houston. She is currently Professor of Art at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri. In 2008 PhotoLucida awarded her a book publication prize for her project Color Falls Down, published in 2010.
Tommy Kha (b. 1988, Memphis, Tennessee) received his Photography MFA from Yale University. He is a Hopper Prize 2020 finalist, Artadia Award 2020 finalist, CR Magazine’s Photography Annual 2019 winner, a Foam Talent 2019 shortlist, Hyères Photography Grand Prix 2019 finalist, an En Foco Photography Fellowship recipient, and a former artist-in-residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Light Work, Fountainhead, and the Camera Club of New York.
His work has been published in FOAM, Creative Review, Dazed, Interview, McSweeney’s, Hyperallergic, Vice, Modern Painters, Slate, the Huffington Post, BUTT Magazine, Buzzfeed, and Miranda July’s “We Think Alone,” and has collaborated with the Billboard Creative in Los Angeles, and exhibited at Launch F18 (NY), LMAKgallery (NY), PS122 Gallery (NY), Brooks Museum (TN), Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art (NY), Blue Sky (Portland), Ogden Museum of Southern Art (LA), Teen Party (NY), Aperture (NY), Yongkang Lu Art (Shanghai), Hyères Festival (France), and Kunstverein Wolfsburg (Germany).
His upcoming book, Return to Sender, will be released in 2021. He appeared in Laurie Simmons’ narrative feature, My Art. His work was the cover of Vice Magazine’s 2017 Photography Issue. He currently teaches photography at the New School. His first solo show occurred at Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon, which was followed by his New York solo debut at the Camera Club of New York in May 2019.
Jennifer Ling Datchuk was born in Warren, Ohio and currently lives and works in San Antonio, Texas. As the child of a Chinese immigrant and grandchild of Russian and Irish immigrants, the family histories of conflict she has inherited are a perpetual source for her work. She captures this conflict by exploring the emotive power of domestic objects and rituals that fix, organize, soothe, and beautify our lives.
Trained in ceramics, her works often use a myriad of materials ranging from porcelain to fabric or embroidery. Datchuk holds an MFA in Artisanry from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and a BFA in Crafts from Kent State University. She has received grants from the Artist Foundation of San Antonio as well as Artpace to research the birthplace of porcelain in Jingdezhen, China.
In 2016, she was awarded a residency through the Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Germany and was a Black Cube Nomadic Museum Artist Fellow. Recently, she completed a residency at the European Ceramic Work Center in the Netherlands and was awarded the Emerging Voices Award from the American Craft Council.
Leonard Suryajaya (Chicago, IL) uses his work to test the boundaries of intimacy, community and family. He uses photography, video, performance and installation to show how the everyday is layered with histories, meanings and potential.
BFA, 2013, California State University, Fullerton; MFA, 2015, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; 2017, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Selected exhibition venues include Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago; Benaki Museum, Greece; Photoforum Pasquart, Switzerland; National Library, Singapore; Wrightwood 659, Chicago; Barney Savage Gallery, NYC; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago. His work is included in collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection, Mana Contemporary and Center for Photography at Woodstock. Awards: Aaron Siskind Foundation Award, Artadia Awards, Robert Giard Foundation Fellowship, New Artist Society Award, James Weinstein Memorial Fellowship, Claire Rosen and Samuel Edes Prize for Emerging Artist, The Santo Foundation Fellowship.
Tomiko Jones’ work is linked to place, exploring transitions in the landscape in social, cultural and geographical terms. Loose narratives unfold in sculptural video installations and questionably fictional photographs. Jones received her Master of Fine Arts in Photography with a Certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Arizona in Tucson.
She is the recipient of awards including the 2013 En Foco New Works Fellowship (New York), 4Culture and CityArtists (Seattle), and Pépinières Européennes pour Jeunes Artistes (France). Recent projects include Hatsubon, a two volume project in photography and video installation; the long-term project Rattlesnake Lake; and the immersive theatre performance The Gretel Project, a four-person collaboration. Tomiko spent three months in residence at Museé Niépce in Chalon-Sur-Saône, France, and in Cassis, France for a project-specific Fellowship at The Camargo Foundation.
Currently Jones is an Assistant Professor of Art at University of Wisconsin-Madison. As an educator she was a Visiting Artist and Curator-in-Residence at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, Assistant Professor and Photography Program Coordinator at Metropolitan State University of Denver, Mendocino College, New Mexico State University and Drury University Summer Institute for Visual Arts.
Now You See Me: Jerry Takigawa, Priya Kambli, Tommy Kha, Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Leonard Suryajaya, & Tomiko Jones
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