Search results for ""author hua hsu""

Tommy Kha: Half, Full, Quarter weaves together self-portraits and classically bucolic landscapes punctuated by the traces of East Asian stories embedded in the topography of the American South. In this first major monograph, featuring almost a decade of work, Tommy Kha explores the highly personal psycho-geography of his hometown. As the artist states, “Memphis has become, for me, not only the place where I was raised but an active borderland between fantasy and memory, nostalgia and history, nonfiction and mythology.” Memphis is where his mother, fleeing Vietnam in the early 1980s, settled, along with his extended family. Throughout the work, his mother emerges as a recurring character, sometimes the subject of quiet photographic study, and in others, a collaborative muse. “I’m a cut of my mom,” Kha asserts, “Every photograph I make of her is a Half Self-Portrait.” In snapshots drawn from a family album that serves as the one record of her journey to the United States, she is the source of nostalgia and barely captured memory. In assembling a visual account of the struggle to find his own voice and narrate the fragmented history of his family, Kha challenges the cultural amnesia around Asian lives and experiences in recent American histories. Acclaimed author Hua Hsu contributes an engaging essay, “People Need to Smile More,” and MacArthur Fellow An-My Lê conducts an incisive conversation with Kha that delves into his family history and artistic strategies. Tommy Kha: Half, Full, Quarter is the result of the Next Step Award, a partnership between Aperture and Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York, in collaboration with the 7|G Foundation. An exhibition of the work will open at Baxter St in New York in February 2023.

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A deeply moving memoir about growing up in the 90s, written in the wake of the senseless killing of a beloved friend.Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Memoir.'A quiet, occasionally hilarious, ultimately devastating book . . . the most moving and memorable piece of autobiography I read this year.' – The Independent, 'The Ten Best Books of 2023''A powerful and beautifully written meditation on guilt, memory and male friendship' – The Guardian, 'Best Books of the Year'When Hua Hsu first meets Ken in a Berkeley college dorm room, he hates him. A frat boy with terrible taste in music, Ken seems exactly like everyone else. For Hua, who makes zines and haunts indie record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to – the mainstream. The only thing Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, and Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the US for generations, have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn’t seem to have a place for either of them.But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet.Capturing a coming-of-age cut short, and a portrait of a beautiful friendship, Stay True is an intimate memoir about growing up and moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.'One of the best nonfiction books about friendship ever, right up there with Patti Smith’s Just Kids' – The Atlantic

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In Depression-era New York, Mr Nut is an oblivious American everyman, who wants to strike it rich. Over the course of a single night he meets a cast of strange characters - disgruntled workers at a Communist cafeteria, lecherous old men, sexually exploited women and pesky authors - all of whom eventually convince him to cast off his bourgeois aspirations to become a radical activist. Absurdist, inventive and suffused with revolutionary fervour, The Hanging on Union Square is a work of blazing wit and originality.

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