Artist Talk: Ocean Vuong in Conversation with Tommy Kha
Presented by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.
This program brings together artist and writer Ocean Vuong and photographer Tommy Kha to discuss Vuong’s photography practice and his exhibition, Sống: Photographs by Ocean Vuong, on view at the A/P/A Institute at NYU. A book signing will follow the conversation.
Sống: Photographs by Ocean Vuong, the artist’s first New York City exhibition, foregrounds working-class diasporic Vietnamese life through a photographic archive spanning nearly twenty years. The photographs on view echo the narratives from Vuong’s literary works by drawing attention to the quotidian and the deeply personal – Vuong’s brother’s shoes, home altars, a mother feeding her baby, an embrace between friends, an American flag.
NYU campus access guidelines: This is an in-person event, open to the public. Registration is required.
Accessibility note: This venue is accessible for wheelchair users. All gender restrooms are available. If you have any access needs, please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu.
About the Artists
Writer, professor, and photographer Ocean Vuong is the author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, winner of the American Book Award, The Mark Twain Award, and The New England Book Award. The novel debuted for six weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and has since sold more than two million copies in 41 languages. He is also the author of The Emperor of Gladness, an Oprah Book Club selection and finalist for the Dublin Literary Award. A nominee for the National Book Award and a recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant, his books of poems include Time is a Mother, a finalist for the Griffin prize, and Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, and the Thom Gunn Award. He was the 2019-20 A/P/A Institute at NYU Artist-in-Residence.
Selected by Time magazine as one of its 100 Rising Cultural Influencers, Vuong’s writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Granta, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets.
Born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Hartford, Connecticut in a working class family of nail salon and factory laborers, he was educated at nearby Manchester Community College before transferring to Pace University to study International Marketing. Without completing his first term, he dropped out and enrolled at Brooklyn College, where he graduated with a BA in Nineteenth Century American Literature. He subsequently received his MFA in Poetry from NYU. In 2026, he will serve as a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University.
Tommy Kha is a photographer currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Kha holds an MFA in Photography from Yale University, where he teaches.
He is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow, a previous recipient of the Hayes Prize, Next Step Award, Foam Talent, and NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow. He has had solo shows at Higher Pictures, Addison Gallery of American Art, BAXTER ST (Camera Club of New York), and Blue Sky Gallery. Kha’s work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Aperture, the New Yorker, among other publications, and most recently was an artist-in-resident at Shadowcliff Residency, Pioneer Works, and Lighthouse Works. He joined Higher Pictures in 2022. His first major publication, Half, Full, Quarter was published by Aperture in February 2023.
Kha’s first museum solo, Other Things Uttered, opened at the Addison Gallery of American Art in September 2025. He has been collected by the Museum of Modern Art, SFMoMA, High Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and George Eastman House.
Left Image: Photograph of Ocean Vuong by Gioncarlo Valentine.
Right Image: Photograph of Tommy Kha by James Amrahs.