I’m confused by the whole thing and the airport’s lack of transparency. I know that they have been trying, and I think everyone’s been trying. I think we can all do better, and that we should have a conversation about this and how this can better benefit people in some ways.
I’d love to hear a bit more about your own relationship with Elvis Presley and Elvis impersonators, what it was like for you growing up so close to all of that.
Well, first, they are called Elvis tribute artists. I do respect and love that community. They’re not impersonators. It might not be for other people, but I think what Elvis tribute artists do is art. Performance is such a one of my practices in my photography and the way I make pictures. But I grew up in Whitehaven, where Graceland is located. I was born and raised in Memphis. I even walked the neighborhood, and I would find myself outside the gates of Graceland. I wanted to get to know Memphis more through Elvis, but I also do that through the Memphis Chinese community.
There’s sometimes an outside perception that issues of race in the South are on a Black-and-white binary, but there are a lot of Southern communities of color that get forgotten about in those assumptions. How does that fit into your work and what happened with this piece?
I think people tend to also forget that I’m a child of immigrants—my parents fled the aftermath of the Vietnam War. These communities have always been here, and it’s now that we’re given the opportunity for space—which is ironic, because we’ve always been here. I think a lot of people are beginning to be a lot more open to possibilities, to new narratives, to familiar narratives, and revisiting something that may not be shared, and that’s OK. I think there have been more nuanced ways of talking about that in the South.
I went to Graceland Elementary, which was mostly an all-Black school. I was a child; I had no concepts of racism then. I always felt like I belonged from that experience. Progressing into public school, there’s definitely some things that become coded in a way that made people feel like they don’t belong. It’s weird that it’s that kind of erasure, that code that “you don’t belong here.”
An Instagram post I saw, it positioned Elvis to be the sole identity of Memphis, like Elvis was responsible for putting Memphis on the map. That sentiment is so disparaging. It’s erasure. It makes me fucking livid to erase the contribution of Black voices, and even if it wasn’t talking about race, it there’s so many great people that have come out of Memphis alone. What about everyday people there that actually make the city run? For my work to be removed, it echoed that sentiment. And, well, here we are.
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