Kim Jakobsen TôPiso 4, Marsella 3 (2023) Signed photograph

Kim Jakobsen Tô is a Norwegian-Chinese-Vietnamese artist based in Oslo, working primarily with photography to explore identity, subcultures and the performance of self. He is drawn to communities where the self is held between everyday life and utopian dreaming: cosplayers, historical re-enactors, spiritual groups.

Working in medium format, he makes portraits built on trust and collaboration, moving between documentary and poetic storytelling. His image-making is slow and deliberate, often unfolding over years alongside the people he photographs. Recent projects concern queer and Indigenous communities and the meeting of spirituality, transformation and belonging. Following sixteen years in England and four in Mexico City, his practice has developed across several cultural vantage points. His father's arrival as a boat refugee, his own queer identity and an ongoing spiritual enquiry shape the current work.

Where the photographs act as record, his sculptural and performative works take up the same questions by hand. The recent installation Gardening with Son looks at his father's garden in Larvik — where Asian plants are grown into Norwegian forest — working sculpturally with the garden as a site of offering and inherited memory. Cedar Dreams (Queer Street Press) is his first book. He is completing an MA at Kunstakademiet i Oslo, where Gardening with Son was shown in 2026.