Through a mixture of audio recordings, portraiture, and environmental photography, this project from New York-based photographers Andrew Kung and Emanuel Hahn explores the lives of the Chinese community in the rural South. It introduces viewers to the community’s experiences and worldview pertaining to their racial and regional identity in the context of a historically segregated part of America.

Asian Americans are relatively invisible outside of large cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, and even in these communities, they are often stereotyped as the model minority.

Kung and Hahn wanted to challenge this narrative and give a platform to the enormous contributions of the Delta Chinese community — from opening grocery stores to building lunar modules for NASA space missions.

Their hope was to broaden the viewer’s perspective and knowledge of Asian Americans through powerful audio-visual storytelling.

About the artists

Andrew Kung is a commercial/editorial photographer based in Brooklyn, NY and rooted in San Francisco. His parents met and married in the South, inspiring a curiosity that led to this project. Prior to pursuing photography full-time, he worked at LinkedIn as Chief Operating Officer and Chief of Staff to the sales leaders of the Sales Solutions team. He has a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from University of California, Berkeley.

Emanuel Hahn is a Brooklyn-based commercial photographer specializing in portraiture. Having grown up in South Korea, Singapore, and Cambodia, he’s curious about different cultures, especially the diaspora community. Before pursuing photography full-time, he worked as a Product Manager and Manager of Strategic Project at itBit, a Bitcoin trading company, and in a variety of roles at several tech companies.

Learn more about the photographers in our interview with them.