Gia Han Reveals the Methodology Behind the Coded Messages She Leaves Within Her Photographs

AGE: 31
BASED IN: New York
NOMINATED BY: Farah Al Qasimi

In my photography, I look for ghosts—both old and new. I look for something familiar but simultaneously strange or foreign to me. A slip in time, or maybe reality. You know—when the surface tension breaks for a moment and you can see a shimmer coming through, transforming into something else.

The most ordinary objects and the people most familiar to me are the most interesting. Maybe this is because I grew up in the suburbs where everything is kind of the same, so you really have to look at things to find their magic. I think a lot about the dynamics between visibility and invisibility, and how that power can shift when both are choices, because—especially as a minority—invisibility usually isn’t a choice.

I like to leave a lot of my work coded, put hidden messages in my images—maybe the color of someone’s nail polish, or the choice of flowers arranged on the table. My work is for whoever gets those messages, but if I had to outright name it, I mostly make work for transracial adoptees and Asian Americans, because a lot of the symbols I choose would be recognizable to those groups. I want my work to help them ask new or different questions—and maybe to encourage them to create new myths about themselves, or unravel old ones.